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>arduino-type toys

Intel has a terrible track record with maker-ish stuff. They routinely launch products, sell them for a year, then discontinue them. (Intel Euclid vision SBC, Intel Edison x86 microcontroller, the realsense stuff, etc)

You can't build an ecosystem around a product if you kill it after a few months. Arudino is only Arduino because they actually stuck around.



Intel owns Altera.

Providing a good FPGA CPU to run all the custom stuff is a great way to sell more chips.

This isn't aimed at makers so much as aimed at huge corporations with loads of money to burn on FPGA hardware, circuit design, and custom software.


Well, lately anyway. The 386EX [1] was supported from 1994 to 2006 with many interesting and "cheap" third party SBCs, replaced in 2007 by the Tolpai SOC line which was killed the following year. It's been all churn since then it seems.

You can still buy tons of 386EX chips and boards on eBay and even a couple first-hand (JK Flashlight) and there's a few modern homebrew designs out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386EX


It is the margins, the maker market is not the way server market works, and their management lacks patience.




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