Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199

Re:Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199 by benjamincburns on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @12:17PM (#6134839)

For some of you scratching your head about why this board is the way it is, check out this Google+ thread from Darren Hart:

https://plus.google.com/101378268367730737515/posts/DGQ9Nkr5...

In the fourth comment he explains some of his design choices:

  One of those factors I mentioned above was making sure the
  board was "replicable". This adds a number of constraints,
  such as:

  * The price cannot include any subsidies (otherwise people
  could not recreate the board at close to the same cost)
  * The parts must have a long product life cycle (this
  eliminates some of the other chips that we might have
  considered) and be readily available (otherwise there would be
  shortages in supply and people wouldn't be able to source the
  parts to make their own)
  * Maker and hacker friendly meant including access to a number
  of buses and other interfaces, which also limited our part
  selection as well as impacting cost.

  There is a fairly lengthy story here, which I'm happy to share
  with anyone interested. All in all, I think we managed to come
  up with a very capable board that will allow people to tweak
  it and hack it and expand it while providing strong
  performance (especially in terms of I/O) and a decent price
  point. More on that as information becomes available...

Edit:

To the best of my knowledge Intel has never focused on releasing designs that an individual can build/modify on their own. To me this represents a very exciting change in Intel's attitude toward "the little guy." Further, to anyone looking to build their own hardware similar to the Raspbery Pi, good luck trying to get Broadcom to talk to you, let alone give you a BSP or sell you chips. Their NDA process/requirements is/are obscene...

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Re:Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199 by aray on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @01:27PM (#6135379)

Bunnie's open-source laptop project (Novena) also had similar philosophies with part selection, with the addition of another requirement I think is pretty important to the maker/hacker community:

"You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs." [1]

I wonder how many of the Minnow's components require NDA/signup/etc for datasheets, or to access (proprietary) firmware.

[1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2686

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Re:Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199 by pgeorgi on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @01:15PM (#6135265)

For a real world story on (not) interacting with Broadcom (and AMD, who don't make a very good impression in that story either), read Jens' second comment on http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/2463/ (Feb 21).

I'm just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers (but you probably end up in the "small" tier faster than with Broadcom)

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Re:Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199 by benjamincburns on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @01:22PM (#6135325)

> just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers

It depends on what you're buying, but for SoC processors and especially chipsets, it's not so great. And re: "who's small" - yeah, I think ~1M units annually is still "small" to Intel.

However, some of their memory products (NOR and EEPROM come to mind) are very attainable for smaller customers.

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