"Unless the Linux community gets their asses in gear and releases a universally usable OS, MS merged with any hardware producer will dominate."
Oh sure, blame it on the Linux community...
Seriously<stepping up to soapbox>, if you want to see the Linux community achieve an objective, get involved in whatever capacity you can. That's the whole point.<stepping down from soapbox to share my own speculations on this>
Even if the Linux community had a "universally" usable OS(what you mean by this is still a ways down the road, IMHO), MS would likely do something like control who gets access to the design info of the processor. This obviously couldn't happen with the first generation of chips if it were an AMD design, but down the road...
Remember, right now the chip makers release that info to developers, because they WANT as many developers developing for their chips. There is nothing that could stop them from "close sourcing" the architecture, to keep others who don't pay a license and sign an NDA, from having all the info to develop for it. In other words, they could force anyone not willing to pay them fees and sign NDAs, to reverse engineer if they want to develop for their chip, meaning anyone not willing to play by their rules will always be substantially behind the game.
Why? OSS as we know it, would not be possible if the developers had to sign an NDA, as the compiler source(which truly is the heart of OSS) would equate to public disclosure of how the chip works(and parts of the kernel probably would as well). Thus, you'd have to reverse engineer it to do anything OSS, which takes alot of time. Or, pay MS up the yinyang to write a closed source compiler to develop the kernel and apps on. Then come up with a way to close the source to those parts of the kernel that would violate the NDA.
Assuming MS would license that info for that purpose in the first place, it wouldn't sit right with OSS developers at all. They'd likely just stick with Intel, transmeta, IBM, etc... and anyone going the MS route will be stuck with MS forever.
Would MS do this if they started making chips? Given their well documented history, it would seem a very MS thing to do.
Yet, at the same time, I get the feeling this would raise the ire of every major computing company. MS might have alot of money, but so does Intel, IBM, Oracle and a whole ton of others and MS doesn't have more money than all of them combined. The politicians would do the bidding of the majority of corporations, and MS would find itself broken into pieces after yet another anti-trust trial. I mean, they came pretty damn close last time. If they pulled this, it'd be game over. The question then would be, does MS think it could wield more political power than all the major computing companies? It's been pretty damned arrogant in the past...
But thankfully, this is all speculation for now. Designing a chip for a console does not equate to trying to take over the PC processor market. It could be a step towards that, but a bunch of other things would have to happen. For now, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Anyone really worried, whose planning on upgrading their computer, ought to consider throwing their money AMDs way, as if they get back into the black, it would make a buyout much more difficult.
***My disclaimer regarding this last part would be I'm a big fan(not fanboy) of AMDs current procs, as they kick butt under Linux. This is subject to change in the future, depending on what Intel throws our way.
<i>SCO is to Linux what a flea is to a dog.</i>
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