Intel's 4-inch "Next Unit of Computing" to cost $400

This really isn't a bad price for what you're getting, though it isn't out of range of what you'd pay for the same components (in a bigger box) from newegg.

I appreciate your sentiment for colder hardware. I do hope it's going to get there some day, but not at the cost of speed. I think we've reached a situation where it's becoming more and more practical to have silent PCs.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html

At any rate, the $400 cost would be minuscule compared to the cost of the screen itself, housing and installation costs. Why try and save a little money and risk having to retrofit or replace the displays in a few years when socially integrated, augmented reality, realtime 3D ads are in vogue.

Not for arbitrary arrays of potentially-disparate displays -- which is where a lot of signage software is going/has gone (being able to marry varying display technologies, resolutions, dpi, etc). While they likely don't need to wring every last flop out of an i5, they do need to be capable of substantially more than driving canned video to a single HD display.

And the more displays an off-the-shelf unit can drive, the cheaper/easier installation and expansion becomes.

It doesn't of course. The argument Intel makes is the same one they have made in the past which is "here is a box your generic engineer can program that is cheap enough to run a sign."

The argument is based on a time/cost to market one. Lets assume you make 1,000 digital signs, and the total cost to the end customer is $10,000 per sign. So you have $10M in potential (but unrealized) revenue sitting there. You can either spend a year developing the software for this sign using an expensive embedded systems programmer for a year at $150,000, or you can spend two months developing the software with a cut-n-paste coder fresh out of college (annual salary $45K so 2 months is $7,500. So your RaPi solution costs $50 each (when you include a case and cables) vs $400 each. So over 1,000 signs that is $350,000 in 'parts' cost extra to use the Intel solution but you also save $142,500 in labor costs, and you are in the market 10 months earlier.

So is that time to market advantage (and the cheaper programmer) a win or not? And since you're looking at $10M in revenue $142,500 is about 1.5% of your margin your giving up.

And finally there is the point that if you do decide to make digital signs out of RaPi's and you can't get the crappy blob-of-bits Broadcom tosses in for their GPU control what are your options? You've got a volume of 10,000 and Broadcom could care less. With Intel they will, with proper documentation, give you every piece of information you need, they already have the support team in place to support their huge OEM business.

When you come at the problem that way it looks a bit different.

And they started running Windows because the industry demanded it. Easier to program and whatnot.

If you think that Intel could now stop producing new CPUs for ATX form factor, you are the one who are nuts. As far as I know, Intel has no plans to leave the desktop market.