'It Looks Like a Growing Sector'
It's always interesting to be "in the middle of a transformation, and right now there is one happening that involves lower-powered computers," noted Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien. 'Intel dominated the last wave, which was to produce ever-more-powerful CPUs, but at a certain point people start to notice that they don't really need ever-more-powerful CPUs.
"Doubling the gigahertz does nothing for your ability to read e-mail, but those power-hungry systems certainly drive up your electricity bill," O'Brien added.
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.