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Indeed. Standardization is one thing ARM really, really needs in order to become a more attractive a choice in general, and only once standardization is achieved will it really be viable for proper enthusiast-use.
I could certainly imagine a future where e.g. the SoC and its RAM are just soldered-on to a motherboard and enthusiasts buy the bundle as-is as that would certainly ease things for the manufacturers and vendors, but for that to happen there must be a proper spec for booting the devices in a standard way and for accessing their resources. Also, it would require the manufacturers to actually start providing up-to-date drivers for their systems.
Alas, given the almost complete lack of interest from the SoC-manufacturers towards enthusiast-/desktop-markets and even actually-working software such a future is likely FAR away.





Member since:
2007-04-18
ARM doesn't have a machine architecture standard such as x86 has (IBM PC), so no wonder there is little to no homebrew when compared to x86. At a fundamental level, from a software perspective, every PC looks the same. There's a BIOS mapped at a certain address which has certain standard functions you can invoke, every PC has a standard ISA and (later) PCI bus interface that is largely probed in the same way, etc. ARM lacks that. Even a single ARM CPU model can be implemented and firmware-coded to wildly different behavior (which is why bootloaders and firmware blobs are often times highly vendor-specific).
IBM's (and their clone maker's) contribution is easily taken for granted, but it was by no means a small thing in the industry.