Hi tonlee, seems like you're doing some great work on this and I think your
plan for campaigning sounds good. I have a couple of comments though:
Firstly, I strongly recommend going for a desktop ATX board over notebook. An
ATX board is very standard, so most people who already own a desktop PC
should be able to switch it in fairly easily, without having to buy any new
hardware (other than the CPU). If you go for a notebook, that will either
restrict it to those people who already have that specific hardware, or mean
that people would have to go and buy a new laptop as well, in order to use
it.
I'm surprised they even mentioned a notebook board. I would think designing
an ATX board would be much easier, because it's nowhere near as constrained
in terms of space and thermal requirements as a notebook (not that I know
very much about PC board design ..).
Secondly, about the performance part - I've been thinking about this some
more and I really think it would need to be better than an Intel Core 2 Duo.
I have a laptop already that has a Core 2 Duo and is 100% libre, so if your
board has a similar spec chip, then what is that giving me that I don't
already have? A big part of the excitement over the Talos II is that it is
using a libre chip that looks like it will give comparable performance to
more recent Intel/AMD chips. I think the project would struggle to gain
support if it isn't raising the bar of what free computing can do.
