On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:16:55AM -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote: ... many reasons omitted ... > I'll leave it to others to assess the good and the bad in those > changes, but I don't think the Fry's and Amazon are the main > drivers.
Intel is exiting the motherboard business (closing the Dupont WA plant, many layoffs in Oregon), and may be exiting the motherboard design support business. CPUs for motherboards might follow. In a decade, motherboards may be a thing of the past. As a Linux user, deploying my own customized machines, this worries me. Most of Fry's desktops are gaming machines, noisy powerhogs. It is difficult to find a new sound-dampening desktop case suitable for a quiet office. There may be a silver lining - when cheap generic motherboard systems are no longer available for Linux, perhaps we will finally knuckle down and design our own open-source custom chips and hardware, optimized for Linux, communications, and secure computing. 16 kbit modulo integer arithmetic processors, perhaps? A few million transistors added to a gigatransistor CPU. This won't be cheap, but there are many Linux professionals around the world, so there might be a business case for a few competitive suppliers of professional Linux hardware. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
