In related news, I'd kill for an open design workstation with a powerful GPU (~iPad 2) + iPad 2-class but 64-bit ARM chip that I could run Linux and Chrome on.
Or even an open spec x64 motherboard with EFI that I can slam an x64 chip into.
There have been a lot of attempts in the past, but has anyone gotten anywhere?
It's pretty hard to make that kind of hw yourself but it's not impossible.
Based on some news here, it looks there are 10-20 years lag between the state of the art and what you can build on your own.
And there are a lot of Asian companies that don't give a shit on what Microsoft wants.
Building something vaguely iPad-class is not all that hard, as long as you are OK with it being open source at the board level rather than all the way down to the silicon level. Check out, for example, the TI BeagleBoard. That's more like a 1-2 year lag, not 10-20.
It looks like some Free Software people (along with the coreboot) guy don't care for EFI, due to IP issues.
However, Free Software hardware (and peripheries like coreboot) efforts rarely seem to gain the kind of sizable acceptance required for these kinds of endeavors.
It looks like the coreboot guy, Stefan, works for Google. So that may be a possible "in" (for example, future Chromebooks).
Or even an open spec x64 motherboard with EFI that I can slam an x64 chip into.
There have been a lot of attempts in the past, but has anyone gotten anywhere?