The PC market may have stabilized and could see its recent declines reverse:
The PC market is forecast to return to growth next year according to Gartner, as buyers come to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10.
Worldwide PC shipments are expected to hit 267 million units in 2018, a 1.9 per cent increase on 2017, when shipments are forecast to reach 262 million. By 2019, shipments are pegged to hit 272 million units.
This year's PC sales are however expected to fall yet again for the sixth consecutive year, with shipments dropping three per cent when compared with 2016.
[...] Elsewhere, smartphone shipments will also continue to grow at a healthy rate, the market watcher claims. Shipments are expected to grow 5 per cent year on year to nearly 1.6 billion units in 2017. Gartner claims that the market is experiencing a shift away from low-cost "utility" phones, towards higher-priced "basic" and "premium" smartphone devices.
PC components are becoming slightly more expensive at the same time.
Also at EE Times.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:36AM
This Open Graphics Project [wikipedia.org] from 2006 is probably the path you may need to look into. Connect it to a decent CPU and you got a free MCU+GPU combination. And if you are designing a board, might as well fix 2x Ethernet PHYs to get some real networking performance.
I have discovered one possible trick with the Raspberry-Pi 3. This model has wireless interfaces and it so happens that those have fast connections to the main CPU. So you can reconnect this data lane to a Ethernet PHY and get real performance. This will need some further investigation to make use of (protocol used between chips).
Those ATI Radeon chips maybe can be desoldered and reused with a ARM chip on a spinned circuit board?