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The Raspberry Pi is now a threat to thin clients.
Citrix has been fooling around with the Pi as a desktop virtualisation (VDI) target for a while, even releasing a prototype Citrix Receiver for the little computers. That effort was in early 2014.
Citrix has since decided it was inefficient to put a lot of effort into creating a special version of Receiver for one device, so instead set to "working with the Pi Organization to ensure our existing Linux Receiver would work with their new Pi2 architecture and supported OS images."
The result of that effort, the company blogged last Friday, is that in "XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 and the new HDX Thinwire compatibility codec, we ... had a codec that would perform efficiently on the Pi2 without the need for hardware accelerated plugins."
This thin client is wafer-thin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:59PM
With recent embedded processors becoming mainstream and powerful enough for general-purpose computing, the Embedded Open Modular Architecture is an initiative to create robust, reliable and interoperable hardware standards for mass-volume systems based around embedded processors, where average users can interchange system modules (containing processor, RAM and storage), even several times a day, without risk of damage, needing any technical knowledge or requiring a technician to assist them.
Products based on EOMA standards should, when sold, be so simple that any salesman can honestly say "Just plug it in: it will work", and where anyone from a small child to an elderly person may be confident in the day-to-day installation, removal and use of EOMA modules in the Electronic Appliances that they own. By complete contrast to existing Industry Standards, there does not exist even a single published open standard which can claim that it is easy for the general public to work with. To explain this puzzling statement further: all other standards require either special technical knowledge, special technical skills, special handling of the device so as not to damage it, and often tools are required. EOMA Standards are designed to require none of these things.
The first initiative is to re-use the old PCMCIA form-factor, in a similar way to Conditional Access Modules [wikipedia.org]. Below, various alternative interfaces are analysed, and thus explain, given the requirements, why PCMCIA was chosen as the first preferred modular format, despite the greatly-reduced pin-count (only 68 pins).