As I said in the last topic: I don’t know much about microprocessors, so I was looking some up.
Microchip’s current design is this system-in-package 40mm x 38mm hand-solderable design. A good bit larger than the vocore, but perhaps closer to what people expect as far as a modern-ish ARM A5 processor. Like the vocore, this is a “system in package”, meaning the difficult DDR DRAM to Processor wiring (BGAs) are already one for you.
The specs indicate a maximum rating of 3.6V and 350mA, so ~1W or so worst case, but not much information on average cases.
Mouser is selling at $50 per module in qty 1. $40 from Microchip’s website at qty >1000. This is approximately the size of 4-quarters.
The vocore chips are very small, but TI’s AM335x line, especially Octavo System’s osd335x is another impressive competitor in this space. OSD335x is BGA however, albeit with large 1.27mm pitch (0.5" pitch), but its BGA nonetheless.
This Microchip design is edge-only castellated module for hand-soldering. Microchip (and TI) both have good documentation on Linux as well. I haven’t used these chips or packages, but I’d probably spring for these if I were making a small design.
My instinct is to lean towards the Beaglebone community, which leads towards TI AM335x and OSD335x. However, the hand-solderability of this Microchip SiP is impressive. I’m sure there are some other packages in the market available for the embedded user as well.