One part of the excitement is about “look what’s possible!”, but frankly this is also worrying to me. Now that people know you can get this level of performance with that power efficiency, they will demand it from other vendors. That is going to pose an interesting challenge: remain with an open architecture with separate parts limited by their interconnects, or like apple go to a closed architecture with everything on an SoC. Most buyers will not care that the architecture is closed, they just want a light and fast laptop with good battery life. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the open pc platform and its wide array of vendors. If the mass market of laptops uses SoC’s the volume will not be there to support OEM parts vendors, and that market will thin out.
I can see why you might be sad about the loss of a component ecosystem, but I think the integrated architecture is primarily a result of physics rather than commerce. This doesn’t mean it can’t be open, like RPI, and maybe we can hope that this will be Intel’s response in the medium term.
But the trend towards on-chip integration and SoCs has been decades long. CPUs also used to be made from discrete components. So I think, for better or worse, the transition to SoCs is inevitable.
AMD tried to do this a decade ago with their APUs. It flatly flopped because they couldn't get the buy-in from software makers. That buy-in problem still exists today.
