Down with x86/x64, more players joining the market game

[Korth]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13688...e-new-acpc-soc
Qualcomm Snapdragon 2cx ... their latest ARM-based SoC ... being pushed into proper ATX motherboards (with all the usual PCIe3, DDR4, M.2/NVMe, USB3.1, SATA, network, audio, etc). They've been working with Microsoft to get a RISC-optimized Win10 port. Planning on releasing Snapdragon laptops 2019, Snapdragon desktops 2020. Qualcomm has announced their intention to continue developing faster and better versions but nobody knows yet if these will be soldered or socketed parts. 7nm. Costs about $90. Can be overclocked.

I know it doesn't seem impressive but there are claims of "nearly identical" benchmark scores with these other parts ...
... i7-8565U = 4C/8T, 1.8GHz~4.6GHz, 15W~25W
... R7-3700U = 4C/8T, 2.2GHz~3.8GHz, 15W~30W
... SD-2CX = 8C/8T, 2.75GHz~3.0GHz (up to 3.6GHz?), 7W (while running the benchmarks through PC emulation!)
And this is without using the iGPU (Adreno 680 roughly equivalent to 2GB/GTX1030) or DSPs or other baked in goodies, although admittedly the AMD part has an iGPU advantage with baked-in Vega10. It can easily handle medium 1080p@60fps games (Wow, Fortnite, PubG, GTA5, etc) at stock 7W TDP target. Not bad at all for a first-gen proof-of-concept "protoype" entry part. Double battery life on laptops will sell, even if Qualcomm never chooses to push towards high-end performances. Although I suspect real performances will be much better since RISC is just faster than CISC overall, especially in today's world of offloading multi-vector instructions to hardware codecs and GPUs (and DSPs). If they wanted to make a Snapdragon with a footprint similar to LGA1151 and ramp it up to 90W TDP then it would utterly blow 10nm Intel/AMD counterparts out of the water.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...ge_windows_10/
Microsoft - in classically treacherous Bill Gates fashion - has of course decided to turn all the work they've been hired to do for one customer into something they can sell to other customers. They'll happily make Windows run on every machine in the world, it's their livelihood, but they won't give anything away free until they're reasonably certain all the suckers have already been milked.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-c...re-workstation
IBM POWER8 on an ATX motherboard. This particular one never worked out but the interest is always there and the time to try again seems to be now. If another project like this starts up (ATX-like workstations with newer POWER9/POWER10 chips and newer GPU-A cards) then I'll be all over it, lol.