They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.
What’s SOC?
System on a chip. Think like a Qualcomm or Samsung processor, or the new M line from Apple
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For most intents and purposes
SoC is from the embedded system development world - as more and more coprocessors were being put into the same chip to consolidate board space and power efficiency, it wasn’t “just” a cpu - it had the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other coprocessors in one
x86 has moved a lot closer to this architecture over the years, but you still generally have a separate chipset controller on the motherboard the CPU interfaces with
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I haven’t looked that closely at laptop CPUs
My guess would be partially because there are fewer possible interfaces, and they’re directly connecting the CPU to a separate Ethernet/WiFi MAC, USB hub controller, and audio DSP rather than having a separate chipset arbitrating who’s talking to the CPU and doing some of those functions?
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The reason is flexibility, the board manufacturer can decide how many PCIe lanes to send where, how many USB ports there’s going to be etc. Modern mainboards are a power delivery system and IO backplane.
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