3 ms·

Why not?

• colejohnson66 5y ago
  My first guess would be NDAs
  • stephen_g 5y ago
    I wouldn't expect so. All you get of third party parts on the schematic is the names of the pins, and that generally isn't kept secret. Sometimes the detailed functional descriptions of each pin are, but generally not anything you'd see from the schematic. If you look at the Open Compute project, there's full schematics available for boards that have far more interesting parts than what would be on this.
    • userbinator 5y ago
      Intel has become notoriously secretive with their documentation over the years, so I think that is very much the issue here. The 8086/8 were very open, but they started closing off little bits at a time after that. "Appendix H" in the P5 era was the first major sign of it. Bits and pieces have leaked out over time, but they still want to keep a lot of it secret. For comparison, someone has made an entire 386 PC motherboard himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829 I suspect there's enough information out there publicly to do everything up to perhaps a PIII (Socket 370 era) or thereabouts, but it starts being much harder beyond that.
• gedy 5y ago
  Guessing so that Chinese clones don't flood market with knockoffs?
  • yellowapple 5y ago
    They would do that anyway, publicly-available schematics or no.
    • userbinator 5y ago
      A lot of existing (leaked) x86 mobo schematics are already available to anyone who cares to look. I don't think there's much "secret sauce" in a standard PC anyway, at least at the component interconnect level; it's almost like one of the worst-kept-secrets in the industry. There is a lot of commonality between all the designs. They might differ in the exact parts they use (e.g. VRM MOSFETs) but there's only so many ways to make something that works.