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My vision for these boards is not to display graphics, but to send/receive data from the internet and a local network. I'm not going to use a Pi to watch movie

My vision for these boards is not to display graphics, but to send/receive data from the internet and a local network. I'm not going to use a Pi to watch movies or some other resource-intensive task. I'd just as soon use the power of GPU that comes with Pi for some other task besides video. What would be interesting is if one of these boards would be designed such that, by pure coincidence, it could fit into an Apple form factor (cheap/old/maybe used). I've read that in, e.g., Vietnam, people with soldering irons do all sorts of hackish things to iPhones. Or maybe a market for curved edge form factor casings develops. Maybe it already exists. But I never saw any Apple-like form factors in the mini-ITX offerings. Whenever you see something with a cool form factor, it seems it's always a proprietary package, hermetically sealed, not easy to tinker with.

rogerbinns 14y ago
The Raspberry Pi starts up by loading an opaque blob into the GPU, and that then runs the CPU under supervision. ie the CPU is a servant and controlled by the GPU, not the other way around as is normal in the PC world. So irrespective of your video intentions, you are still at the mercy of a blob.
- excuse-me 14y ago
  But unless your are a real FOSS zealot (say > 500milli Stallmans) you are at the mercy of the bios, the disk controller firmware and the CPU microcode on any machine In reality being able to run whatever user programs you want in whatever combination you want without artificial is what FOSS is all about.
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    The "user programs" you want to run are determined by the operating system. And the operating system is determined by blobs, controllers, BIOS and similar gunk. If for example the Pi blob is such that Linux kernel 3.7 can't run then you are SOL. Or if on a device like this their blob only works with Android 2.3 then you can't run a different version. Or maybe you can't run one of the BSDs. The video/GPU is especially relevant in the Pi case because it controls what the CPU can do.
    - excuse-me 14y ago
      Yes that's true - I was thinking of people who complain they don't have details for some deep detail of the GPU shader cores to write an opensource driver for their NVidia card.

rogerbinns 14y ago

The Raspberry Pi starts up by loading an opaque blob into the GPU, and that then runs the CPU under supervision. ie the CPU is a servant and controlled by the GPU, not the other way around as is normal in the PC world. So irrespective of your video intentions, you are still at the mercy of a blob.

excuse-me 14y ago
But unless your are a real FOSS zealot (say > 500milli Stallmans) you are at the mercy of the bios, the disk controller firmware and the CPU microcode on any machine In reality being able to run whatever user programs you want in whatever combination you want without artificial is what FOSS is all about.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  The "user programs" you want to run are determined by the operating system. And the operating system is determined by blobs, controllers, BIOS and similar gunk. If for example the Pi blob is such that Linux kernel 3.7 can't run then you are SOL. Or if on a device like this their blob only works with Android 2.3 then you can't run a different version. Or maybe you can't run one of the BSDs. The video/GPU is especially relevant in the Pi case because it controls what the CPU can do.
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    Yes that's true - I was thinking of people who complain they don't have details for some deep detail of the GPU shader cores to write an opensource driver for their NVidia card.