Is the x86 Ready for Consumer Appliances?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @03:30PM from the is-intel-the-way-to-go dept.

rckymntrider asks: "By now, it's pretty obvious that the movers and shakers of the PC industry are shifting their attention to consumer electronics. Consumers today demand capabilities from their set-top boxes that PCs already deliver (examples: HDTV and gaming). They just don't want a bulky, hot and noisy PC next to their beautiful new plasma TV. Intel, for instance, announced several initiatives for bringing their technology to the media/home automation front, including the establishment of a $200M fund for companies in that arena (small change if you ask me). As a small manufacturer of media-centric devices (I will not name the company and product -- this is not a plug), I have become very frustrated at the availability of hardware for 'consumer' type of applications. ATX? Micro ATX? Too big. Eighty watt CPUs? You're kidding me! Mini ITX? Better but not powerful enough and *way too expensive*. Besides, every new piece of hardware that comes out is practically designed for Windows, and we all know that this is not the operating system that will drive consumer appliances, right? So to sum it up, do you think that the traditional x86 architecture, even with the advent of PCIX and the likes, is suitable for consumer anything? What other platforms do you see on the horizon that could still offer things like High Definition video capability and not double as mini-heaters? Have you ever heard (or envisioned) of a platform designed for powerful but still cost-effective consumer appliances? VIA tried with their EPIA platform but - in my opinion - they failed. Do you think Intel will do it? If not, then who?"

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Re:Just a Question... by Ieshan · 2004-02-18 19:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

Of course it's remotely logical.

Windows gets accused of bugs it's often not responsible for. Because some shoddy developer never realized that people might be running on system configuration X instead of system configuration A, when his application crashes, people often blame Windows hardware support.

I'm not advocating for Windows, I'm just saying it's got decent hardware support and that when writing an application for one specific set of hardware it's made to appear infinately better because the consumer can't screw with the default application environment.

Most of the problems aren't with unstable *hardware*, it's unstable and ugly Windows Malware.