'This Is Wise Behavior'
Last but not least, blogger Robert Pogson took a similar view.
"Intel, one of the two heads of the Wintel monster, is diversifying and actually producing products for a competing platform, GNU/Linux," Pogson told Linux Girl. "Investing in the GNU/Linux environment is beginning to pay for many corporations and Intel does not want to be left at the dock when the Wintel monopoly finally sinks. This is wise behavior and shows Intel at least knows how to behave as a normal business, unlike M$."
Eventually, however, "I hope Intel decides to get back into the ARMed CPU business, because ARM is better for many purposes," he opined. "In robotics, for instance, the job requires multitudes of networked computers, something that is much less expensive with ARM.
So, "Intel has wisely made the move to get into this space in a number of ways," he concluded. "This probably started to get into the consciousness of the public with the Raspberry Pi, but now others are starting to appear, and it looks like a growing sector."
Intel has "often tried to stick a foot into any market for chips where there is money to be made," Slashdot blogger hairyfeet pointed out. "Remember the Celeron? That was their way of getting into the low-end market Cyrix and WinChip had started, and of course netbooks where they came up with the Atom to counter the low-end ARM netbooks running Linux that had popped up.