Re: [9fans] /sys/include/ip.h 5c(1)

[Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>]

In article <13426df10910061432y17cf8632ta09af4ffe215375b@mail.gmail.com> you write:
>On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>> I understand all your points, and many of them are good ones. But there
>> really are places where you don't want to go, and into the chipset
>> is one of them.
>
>Not really the case. People do want to go there, so they can do
>interesting things like put an FPGA into a CPU socket.

The percentage of people who want to do this, compared to the number
of people who just want to buy a finished computer, is way down in the
noise.  It's a marketing / sales / ROI issue.

And again, at least for the client side chipsets, you REALLY don't
want to go there.  Writing firmware for them is a big job.

>Non-x86 vendors in the embedded space don't say things like " there
>really are places where you don't want to go" in my experience.

The chipsets we're talking about are not for the embedded space.  At least
the ones I'm familiar with. Intel is targeting the embedded space with SOC
(System On Chip) solutions.

Good, bad, indifferent, I have no clue.

>Just
>look at the fact that so many ARM-based boards use U-boot -- GPL'ed
>firmware. That's why so much of the really cool stuff at various
>conferences nowadays usually involves non-x86 embedded systems -- you
>can do interesting things there you can't do in the x86 world any more
>-- things you used to see done on x86es now get done on other systems.

Intel (for better or worse, I'm not making a value judgement) makes
marketing calls; where will they sell the most chips and chipsets?
Embedded is certainly a market they want to move into (c.f. the recent
purchase of Wind River), but it's not the main market now.

Much of the embedded world is moving to Linux and/or some version of
Windows (MIDs, smart phones, c.f. Moblin).  For them, what Intel provides
is fine.

The circles you move in are different, and definitely more interesting,
but also much smaller that most of what the rest of the world is doing.

Again, NOT a value judgement about your work or about how Intel works,
just my take on things.

Thanks,

Arnold
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