Patent expiries moves along. Anything associated with Pentium Pro or PowerPC G3/G4 has expired, and we're getting to Pentium M ("Centrino") and Athlon64. CPU d

Patent expiries moves along. Anything associated with Pentium Pro or PowerPC G3/G4 has expired, and we're getting to Pentium M ("Centrino") and Athlon64. CPU design is only tweaking after that, nothing fundamental. GPUs is a bit more of a headache. Patents for things such as Rage 128 and TNT2 should be free now, but we've still got five years to go until patents for unified shader model expire. That's again, basically the last fundamental advance in GPUs. Good open-source DRAM controllers are desperately needed. There are examples for DDR3. A problem is that some of the standards themselves for critical things such as USB, WIFI, DRAM are not free.