Kevin Karhan 
Except #VIA failed to make their #Chips & #iGPU|s available en masse at a reasonable price point.
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Slaíne@kkarhan worked on a lot of boards that had that cpu. Industrial PC board makers were a big user and a company I worked for at the time turned them into various bespoke PC and STB products.
@slaine I know. #VIA did keep a foot in #embedded since they were still offering new C7 chips in 2016 and are only beaten by like DM&P's #Vortex86 SoC's and their #ICOP-branded #SOM|s...
- The main problem was just that many cool ideas they did - like the #Artigo in 5,25" form factor - were never available outside of closed "big" #B2B-only distributors where one needs to first sign up as a client to even be allowed to browse their catalog and have to fax or call to get actual pricing info.
This is why #RaspberryPi (and to an extent #DMP) own the market, as I can literally just order either conveniently online with not much of a hassle.
@kkarhan 💯 on the missed opportunity. But there’s an element of hindsight is 20/20 there too. I’ve never seen figures but it seemed to me that they sold a truck load of product with that arrangement at the time.
@slaine But even a "truckload" is basically not much compared to #Intel & #AMD, because #VIA basically never did anything beyond "#LowEnd", #Chipset, #Peripherals and #Embedded, whereas with both Intel & AMD one can go from the tinyiest < 5W SoC for fanless Thin Clients up to Dual & Quad-Socket Multt-Core Servers that have more PCIe lanes than any systems integrator could saturate with NVMe drives and GPUs in a 2U - 4U chassis!
- And again: I wanted to get my hands on VIA stuff because it was neat and cool looking but I wasn't in the position to open up like a GmbH and negotiate deals with distributors just to get my hands on some reference board & case.
Whereas AMD & Intel managed to make deals with a shitload of OEMs and that's why modern #ThinClients rock AMD G-Series and Intel Atom SoCs.
- So far their move to making #ARM-SoC's didn't change that but rather worsen it.
Add to that how the German subsidiary of VIA got axed and there wasn't even like someone I could mail or fax for a list of distributors that would actually sell to me as an individual.
@slaine Personally, I'm looking at #FrugalComputing with @OS1337 and decided to follow @rasteri 's lead and try some #PC104Plus board design (#tiny486) for #RetroHardware because old & dying machines are not a good reference solution for #i486...
@slaine np. Contributions & Feedback welcome.