Industry Expert Blogs
The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You're a CPU BoardSemiWiki - Don DingeeOct. 15, 2012 |
In a discussion with one of my PR network recently, I found myself thinking out loud that if the merchant SoC market is getting squeezed hard, that validates something I've been thinking - the merchant CPU board market is dying from the middle out.
There still will be success with boards, in 2 areas: the low end (say, <$300), and the high end (say, >$3000). But the middle is disappearing, slowly but surely.
The low end will have things like BeagleBone, and the Raspberry Pi, and development boards for all sorts of microcontrollers. These low end boards will proliferate because SoCs have lots of popular interfaces, and there are low-cost expansion modules to add that one feature a project needs.