I was wondering about 2 things:
observation_1)
It takes a "big" market to drive down the unit cost of anything that requires development, specially hardware. The more people buy a microchip, the more the cost of its development can be spread across the end users of the microchip.
observation_2)
The more universal a piece of equipment is, the greater its potential market.
observation_3)
The WiFi chipsets and GPU-s are ridiculously cheap compared to the effort that went in to designing them. Semiconductor Foundries that service multiple vendors, produce totally different chips, are a stellar example, how gigantic investment can be diluted to the point that people consider their products cheap commodities.
The question, "The Q", is: if drivers for WiFi cards, GPU-s, USB pheripherals, etc. are such an issue, then why isn't there an economic incentive to just produce loads-and-loads of FPGA-fabric and make every OS just read in, how the fabric has been connected in the current hardware, re-compile VHDL and load its own code to the FPGA-fabric, ELIMINATING THE NEEDS FOR HARDWARE VENDORS TO INVEST TO DRIVER DEVELOPMENT and INCREASING THE POTENTIAL MARKET FOR THE HARDWARE, FOR THE PRODUCTS OF THE HARDWARE PRODUCESRS?
What am I missing?
The economics is there, technology is there, a RELATIVELY RECENT precedent of introducing new types of computers to the market is there, in the form of Android phones and touchschreen based readers. There's even a competitor to the ARM: http://riscv.org/
Basically, the first, if not the very first, then at least the second, FPGA-vendor, who creates a proper set of open tools wins the market and buries the Intel and AMD and ARM alive. The various FPGA-patents should also be outdated by now. A prototype might be made by loading a closed source FPGA with a VHDL-design that implements the open source FPGA. Even that has been done: "Flavia: the Free Logic Array"
https://www.element14.com/community/groups/fpga-group/blog/2014/07/21/flavia...
I admit, I do not imagine that any classical Venture Capitalist would ever invest to that project, but, hell, most of them did not invest even in Google and Facebook.
Thank You for reading my letter and I hope to receive critisism that explains, why the idea described in this letter is hopeless or otherwise dumb or stupid.
Thank Your. :-)
Somewhat esoteric, Martin.Vahi@...427...