Other than it's a test board... why does have 5 power cables?

Yeah I would have said waaay too many molex power connections. Big ole fat heat sink... but I am a software guy.

Future prediction time:


Intel will crow and crow and will eventually uncork a 14nm process mobile something or other.  Because of the lithography, it will have an inherent 30-40% improvement in energy consumption (theoretically speaking) to what Intel is doing now.

But this will be a 30-40% theoretical improvement over current Intel designs which currently require a separate on-board energy nanny chip to fakemock doing something close to current REAL ARM energy consumption levels?

Prediction:   Intel's first 14nm chipsets will be VERY COSTLY and they will have to be very strongly loss leader priced so they can sell into some real products.  

And once the vapor cloud actually settles they might not really be more price/performance efficient compared to the then current 20mn ARM offerings from the Chinese Cheapie guys.  

This has consistently been the case before, after all the vapor settles.

Before, Intel could get away with gross inefficiency because MS ran on them.   MS is no longer a compelling advantage and Intel knows it.  

The story will change drastically whenever a FOSS general purpose ARM OS becomes widely accepted.

Intel may never get their head above water ever again ....

Not yet time to count Intel out -- Nadella at Microsoft is going to show Intel THE WAY to succeed in phone/tablet space and he is gonna want his good buddy Intel to make it for him.

Nadella is gonna show Intel how to fill up all those huge wafers with billions of little bitty 22nm (then later on 14nm) copies of Microsoft's new ARM standard chipsets for Windroid.

Yup, what is gonna save both Microsoft and Intel is to make ARM their centrality -- and do it better and cheaper than the Chinese Cheapie guys can do it.

Microsoft is gonna lift a full copy of the Android Open Source Project and the Chromium OS Open Source Project while it is still out there under the Apache 2.0 license (the one that it is currently running under) and they are gonna MicroChop it as theirs.  

There will be some illegality with the Chromium stuff as it isn't licensed to anyone yet by Google officially, it is just out there for community development.

So Windroid will be born, Microsoft's Threshold Project will be a frankie OS system built from Open Source Android and Open Source Chromium Project parts with some Linux parts and some BSD parts and a very few proprietary Windows parts tacked on it here and there just to legitimatize it as "Windroid".

Just like they did with DOS and OS 2 and Netscape and you name it in the past .....

It will be Windroid, the stitched together from stolen parts monster that could change the world.

Then Microsoft/Nokia/Intel is gonna want the very best of the ARM 64 bit designs run under Intel's full ARM design license (slightly modified in a proprietary fashion of course) run by the big huge wafer full at 22-14 nm on Intel's very best lithography processes to use to fuel the new Windroid Revolution .....  

..... and the two large cash fat companies are going to group together to loss leader the chipsets and stolen OS system into carving out a huge new phone/tablet market share for themselves by actively running all of the least of the ARM Cheapie Chinese completely out of business inside of 6 months.   And a few of the middle sized ones as well .....

You see, Windroid will have a consistent set of published software/hardware STANDARDS associated with it .... something the cheapie guys could never get straight in their little lacrosse stick wielding little puddin' heads in a million years.

You see, Microchoke knows that the guy who publishes and controls the INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS wins all the legal battles after the fact.

Also never forget that Intel has a manufacturing side, and that at one point in time they built more white box computers CHEAPER than anyone else in the world.

The NUC itself is a current Intel in-house product and Intel builds all the motherboards, power supplies and boxes for Dell even up to today.

Microchoke has Nokia for their manufacturing force.


=====================


It is the old old Wintel Way all over again and again and yet again -- if you can't beat them fairly by competing against them with your own good ideas, then by golly screw them over by stealing their ideas from them and claiming them as yours ..... simply by writing, publishing and enforcing a set of standards.  

And by actively suing the hell out of the people who breach YOUR published set of standards .... yup, the arsehole with the most lawyers always wins in the end.

And it's not like suing people for "infringement"  isn't a 1 billion+ dollars per year Business Group there at Microsoft (because it is).

The guys from Digital Research, Bell Palo Alto Labs, Netscape and IBM OS 2 are waving their arms and yelling and hopping up and down saying
"Hells Bells boys, pay attention -- you are letting them do it all over again !!!"

And they are    

Google, wake the fluck UP  !!!!

Why else do you think they need Bill Gates back out of retirement as "Technical Advisor" so badly?  

Nobody else remembers the stealing and conniving that took place back in the beginning better than the man who did it all .....

And unless Bill Gates personally says "Yes, this is the path to take" the rest of Microsoft will simply not follow anyone anywhere else.

Justin, DO something about it then.

You got the same world of choices that I started out with.   I was never (and am not now) a Linux command line geek -- I just picked my distros VERY carefully so I don't  have to be.

There is a little bit of shell shock at change over time, that is why I went dual boot and if something got dicey on me I just went back to Windows to get it done.

But this quickly became rarer and rarer until now I am running a 64 bit Linux Mint (Mate version) on a 2009 vintage $80 refurbie box from Dell Leasing and I am perfectly content with it.  

No windows on it at all ..... no chasing anti-virus programs .....  no defragging .....

No expense either -- everything is free.

That is nice too -- money is getting scarcer for me all the time and I am still working a full 40 hours a week, just not at any upscale job any more.

How very MOnsantoish of him,,
& yes, he is actively engaged in the eugenics movement, thru the "vaccinations" they so lovingly Give to the 3rd world populations and, IIRC, he is a large Monsatan stock holder.