[conspire] Quiet, Freedom-compatible NAT/firewall/misc box?

[Rick Moen]

Just wanting to elaborate a bit on:

> Suspicion #2 (less conspiratorial):  AMD suffers because it's been
> crowded into price competition with really anaemic, low-spec ARM-based
> boards best suited to smartphones and low-end tablets that are so cheap
> that the OEMs just aren't willing to pay for better performance and
> fewer limits.
> 
> #2 would explain both why it's so difficult to _find_
> enthusiast-friendly (i.e., not an HP Pavillion sealed-tight mini-something) 
> units based on the newer and truly amazing low-power, high-performance
> AMD SoCs, _and_ why low-power computing has been almost completely
> abandoned to stripped-down ARM offerings with all their
> proprietary-software dependencies and utter lack of standard kernel
> support, even after _many_ years of ARM-based Linux computing.

Somehow through dominating the upper end of the market, Intel seems to
have perpetuated a perception that its CPUs and chipsets are preferable
to AMD's at _every_ price point and in every specialty within the x86_64
market space, which is very demonstrably very untrue.  In the low-power,
low-cost segment, AMD has lately had _massively_ better offerings,
especially per dollar.

You look for an Intel-based low-power system, and inevitably find an
Atom-series CPU, which frankly is a bit lackluster in performance, in a
chipset that, at best, maxes out at 8GB RAM.  The AMD alternatives are
things like the ASRock mini-ITX / AMD Kabini bundle I cited on Newegg, 
which has a quite fast CPU that draws less power than the Atom, runs
cooler, and plugs into a motherboard that maxes out at 32GB.  And the
ADM package ends up being cheaper, as well.  But people will recommend
Atom-based things anyway, because Intel.  Which is kind of crazy.

The lower end, which is what low-power is considered to be, rightly or
wrongly, is dominated within the hardware industry by the
embedded-computing mindset (that surrounds ARM).  As Don Marti will tell
you (he having been Editor of _Embedded Linux Journal_ for some years,
the embedded-computing offshoot of _Linux Journal_, secrecy and
proprietary components are totally routines in the embedded space.  GPL
enforcement against embedded-computing hardware companies typically
fails for a number of reasons including chipset churn being so rapid
that the violator can just stall for a few months until the model in
question gets EOLed and then says 'Hey, we've ceased violating.'  Rapid
chipset churn also means that reverse-engineering is less fruitful
because so many things are moving targets.

But the effect of the _standard_ low-power offerings being relegated to
ARM is that everyone gets so used to the user-facing hassles and
compromises of the ARM platforms that the hassles and compromises fade
to background: Rarely do they get talked about, even by Linux people.
They become 'normal', so people don't say 'Wait, this is stupid.  Is
there an alternative that's _almost_ as power-thrifty and _almost_ as
cheap that doesn't have these problems?  With no strange boot
configuration and bootloader setups, no out-of-tree patchsets against
old and moldy kernels?  No proprietary blobs just to run X11?'

And that is exactly what you _can_ get with the sort of AMD SoC /
miniature motherboard setup I've been talking about in this thread.  
In general, the 'HTPC' market is producing some really kick-ass small
form-factor, quiet, low-power hardware at very low prices, and AMD by
all rights ought to own that market, given the exceptional things the
Kabini/Temash, let alone the hard-to-find Beema/Mullins SoCs seems
capable of, provided the OEMs bother to ship motherboards that can use
them instead of assuming that everyone wants ARM-based alternatives just
because they hit absolute bottom dollar.

I'm really not quite understanding why the OEMs have in general done
almost nothing with those chips in SFF PCs, and instead apparently put
them only into tablet computers.  It's a pity they haven't.

And all I can add to that is:  Linux people who want quality low-power
gear need to be better at voting with their dollars, or this bad
situation will get worse.