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Intel to Drop Low-end Chipsets
SimilarityEngine writes "Intel is planning to terminate production of its 910GL, 915GL and 915PL chipsets by the end of August, as part of a shift in focus towards higher-spec products, possibly with support for new FSB architectures, multi-core processors and a host of other much-requested features relating to virtualisation and security."
Do you mean "security for the end user" or "security for Microsoft, to keep the end user from doing things which Microsoft does not want them to"?
anyone know if the remaining chipsets will contain the Trusted Computing chips?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Tell me it ain't so Intel :-(
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
If the biggest of one of the only 2 consumer processor manufacturers drops production on low-end processors, who are people going to buy low-end processors from? Most people don't even know who AMD is.
Well, this could be their response to lackluster sales of their new CPUs with dual cores... Though they could simply be using their shear force to move things forward to the next battlefield...
Though, I'm more of an AMD fan myself, in some ways this is good news.. moving forward on dual core, and pentium M based processors.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I don't believe that the margins are worthwhile at all on the lower end chipsets. Sis/AMD/VIA provide really stiff competition in that arena... Its a sensible move on Intels part
just leave low-end to AMD. newsflash, intel: latin america and most of the world (the third world if you want) still needs low-end because of costs, so unless your high-end chips will cost the same as low-end you'll just be leaving the chipset market to SIS, VIA and the rest of cheap chip-makers. and knowing how bad these chips perform, people will just buy athlons for the same price (well, just like we used to do a couple of monts ago with athlon vs. p4).
that intels chipset fab are at their limit and they are simply dropping their lowest margin products?
(its even in the article)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
now thats what i call focusing on security!
Uhm, they tried that with the slot 1, and slot a, it didn't work well, slowed responsiveness, and was more difficult to cool.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Also with things like the memory controller going into the cpu (athlon-64) for performance, things that further separate the cpu from the motherboard, won't have a decent upgrade path, in addition to memory architectures changing nearly as rapidly as cpu architectures, you are just as well off upgrading mb+cpu+ram at the same time, replacing subsets of those, only when one or the other fails, and upgrading the three when upgrading your system.
Doesn't make sense to upgrade your cpu to the new Uber-Pro5 when you are stuck with crappy DOA-533 ram, and the older PCIxtreme-2048 bus for your video.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Actually, I wish they would do that. I'd love to see what we could get out of CPUs that didn't have to be backwards compatible with an overgrown calculator chip.
In the 90s the American carmakers got out of the low-marign car business, and moved with all their gusto to the high margin trucks and SUVs.
This was a disaster, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost. Already Chrysler is history, and we are all just wondering whether Ford or GM will be next to go. And now the Germans, Japanese and Koreans compete with them in the high end -- there is nowhere else to go. I guess cars like the Maybach are even higher margin, but the Americans can't economically build it (nor something like a Lamborghini).
So Intel better be makign some new, super-breakthrough stuff, that the other guys just don't have at all -- or the current high-margin business will become medium and then low-margin; at which point VIA will eat them alive.
Japanese companies understand that you need to keep on making stuff, even low margin stuff, if only to stop the other folks from entering your citatdel and killing you one day. A bit like Cisco making cheapo stuff (Linksys) to keep the wolves at bay. You've got to get through Linksys before you can attack Cisco.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Get rid of the "throw-away" atmosphere, and build some dignity in the market that products will keep their value. Only a shithole like China would think of such a bad idea, as buy-once throw-away computer hardware; because China values life of the people as verry cheap and replacable, just like the products they export.
It's not the Chinese throwing away perfectly good computers... it's the US. The Chinese just make what the US demands. By contrast, Chinese culture is such that people tend to use all kinds of things until they fall apart. I don't know where you get the idea that China is a "throw away" economy, and the US isn't.
Hell, I'm thrilled about this announcement, and every hardware "upgrade" announcement. I don't buy into the consumer culture, so all of our PC's come from the local thrift shop (generally $25 for a PC, $100 for a 17" monitor). This just means more stupid Americans throwing away perfectly good machines that I can snap up for peanuts. Schweet!
I don't respond to AC's.
This might turn out good, as it hopefully will allow the "high" end chips to be manufactured and sold in bigger quantities. /us/.
Which ought to lead to cheaper prices.
More bang for the buck for
New processors (both Intel and AMD) support the ability to have a page of memory that is readable and writable, but not executable. That's the whole NX, and execute disable thing you've seen on Slashdot. What this does is effectively prevent many kind of buffer overflows from being dangerous, since they overflow into an area of memory that isn't marked executable.
So at least some of what Intel is doing with their new chips is for the benefit of the consumer.
possibly with support for new FSB architectures, multi-core processors and a host of other much-requested features relating to virtualisation and security.
I think I speak for the entire Slashdot readership when I say:
We don't care about computers anymore. It was a fad, it's over. Whatever. Let's move on with our lives.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
you pay $100 for a 17" monitor and think that is a good deal? You sir, are an idiot.
Just because they aren't making low-end chipsets doesn't mean they won't be getting chipset revenue from the low end. As even the cheaper processors move to multi-core, shared L3, multi-CPU capable, etc, the complexities of producing an unlicensed chipset will become more and more prohibitive. Assuming AMD can be squeezed out (Intel seems to be making good progress there), then if you want to make a chipset for any kind of low-end PC, then you'll need an FSB license from Intel. They'll likely make more money out of the licensing than they would from the tedious business of designing/making/marketing/selling/supporting the chips themselves.
I was thinking the same. I got my class A EIZO 21" for 70.
But I couldn't agree more with the parents' point
Good that I own an AMD. Actually never bought an Intel product in 15 years. So *shrug* from me...
After a review of Intel's Trusted Platform Module,
o ads/trusted_platform_module_white_paper.pdf
.5c to .10c a track, but I guarantee you they will pay $10 to $20 a track after Intel promulgates this bastage of a trogon horse.
http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/platform/downl
I have to completely agree that it is entirely redundant with well established systems.
Examples include
www.pgp.com for encrypted file systems.
Even Encrypting File System EFS which is free will do
I know of a few system that encrypt from bootstrap to power off as well
Their are potentially hundreds of products which perform the function of TPM today(without the DRM)
Their is no functional gain for anyone but those who want to whole sale DRM content for a premium to suxxors who now pay
But Intel will do as Intel has always done.
Ignore all the users on the planet, brown nose to Microsoft the RIAA and government who would dearly love to enable un by passable real time tax assessments on all internet on-line purchases.
I'll bet you the same year Intel succeeds; suddenly the Federal government will waffle and legalize every sort of crap now illegal because they can then tax it.
So you want legal drugs on line tax real time epay and a DRM album that costs $160 sign on to DRM
--
After were gone who will remember what we were fighting for?
Well, then maybe I have that backwards. It's been a few months. Maybe it was $100 for a PC and $25 for a monitor. I don't remember.
I don't respond to AC's.
Except for the Itanium2 which is sort of a running joke, everything Intel has out there right now is low end. The only great product they have on the market is the Pentium-M. Their Dual-Core is a joke, both in architecture and in heat/power consumption. IF you compare AMD's current products (Opteron x65/70/75 line and the Dual Core 64's) to intel's best offerings, there is no comparison AMD wins hands down in almost all categories. The categories that matter to me there is not a real choice AMD runs away with it.
Also has anyone gotten SLI mode to work for a workstation on an Intel platform? Last time I saw it attempted it couldn't be done reliably, at least not with Nvidia's solution. I wan't my servers to use the least amount of power, put out the least amount of heat, have the smallest footprint possible and have excellent performance. I can balance those with Dual Core Opterons and get something that comes in a great package. IBM/SUN/HP all sell those types of servers and Intel just can't touch them.
If you think _that's_ a complicated post with such buzzwords as rapacious, comprehensive underground, chauvinism, mongering, bargains with the devil, slimy turncoats, nugatory notions, pestiferous, undocumented conspiracism, etc. then you are right.
Searching Google for "nugatory notions" produces some interesting reads. I'm sure all of you have better things to do.
Anybody remember the Motorola 68000? It was a really advanced, slick processor that a bunch of people thought would be great for desktop computers. The Intel 386, by comparison, was awful; clunky, hackish, slow, in all the cheap plastic solution for processors. Yet the m68k is all but gone these days, while processors derived from the 386 dominate the market.
Intel has forgotten the most important lesson of computer hardware production: always go with the cheap plastic solution.
> $25 for a PC, $100 for a 17" monitor That may not be a bad price for a PC, but you can get a new 17" CRT monitor on, say, Newegg, for as little as $114, shipped. So, unless you were talking LCDs, you might want to consider shopping around for any future monitors.
..two days from now will the the automatic "New intel chipsets implement DRm technology" post. and everyone can complain this was all a plot by the **AA
Slot 1 was implemented because the processors at the time (Pentium 2 and early Pentium 3s) required large amounts of cache RAM to operate quickly. The slot 1 board contained the processor and the layer 2 cache RAM. By putting it on a daughterboard, they could clock the cache at a higher speed than the motherboard front side bus. I believe the initial systems ran the cache at half the speed of the cpu. In comparison the motherboards at the time were running at 66MHz - with the CPU at 233MHz or higher.
The Pentium Pro used two dies in the chip package, one containing the CPU the other the layer 2 cache. This technique was dumped in favor of slot 1 because it reduced yields. Basically both dies had to be functional or else the chip was useless. Slot 1 was considered a cheap interim technique until they could integrate the layer 2 cache directly into the CPU die. Once the Pentium 3 "flip chips" with on die cache were introduced, the slot 1 was phased out. Placing the cache on die was cheaper and gave better performance than slot 1.
Slot 1 was never designed to be able to swap out multiple varieties of CPUs. In fact slot 1 locked out AMD from interoperating in the same motherboard - as opposed to socket 7 which could accommodate either AMD or Intel processors.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
...you might have a good potential class action suit there. Your claim certainly seems reasonable, If they gave you a license, you should still be allowed to play the game. Perhaps run it by an IP lawyer, I have no idea if there's precedent or not.
I say any time you can legally stick it right back at the entertainment monopolists it's worthwhile to do so. I can't believe people put up with this stuff, including expensive software with zero warranties. Freebies with no warranties are understandable, paying hundreds of dollars and up for software though is a different story. Once cash changes hands there needs to be a warranty involved, IMO. Every other consumer product out there has a warranty.
"Between SiS and Via, they (Intel) prefer SiS chipsets for the Intel CPU platform given the better graphic quality," Morgan Stanley analyst Ellen Tseng said in a newsletter to investors"
Quality from an onboard vga card! Can someone point to a motherboard with an onboard vga card comparable to a one-year-old-at-most, mid-level vga card?
On the other hand VIA's chipsets never ending hd-corruption and ide-speed problems should be reason enough for VIA to warrant a bankrupt-inducing class-action law suit.
My experience is that AMD chips last longer than Intel chips because intel simply makes cheaper chips and they are designed to burn out sooner than the equivallent AMD chip. In the bad old days when Intel dominated, they would also charge a lot more for their CPU's until AMD was able to produce chips in big enough quantitiy to take on intel so we could all have cheaper computers.
it's been this way for at least 5 years.
when you buy a new system/upgrade an old one with the shinest tech at the time in the hopes of just popping in a new cpu; by the time you want to upgrade the cpu, the motherboard/ram/etc will be too limiting to make it useful.
it's cheaper and easier just to upgrade the mb/ram/cpu every time you want more juice. things are a lot cheaper now than ever in the past (except for those bastard memory companies colluding to keep prices inflated for the past 3 years)
people with socket 939(any socket) will be sorely disappointed when in 1-2 years that a new cpu won't perform as well as the one in a new
motherboard with faster ram.
5-600 bucks every 2 years and you'll be basically at the top of the heap in terms of computing technology.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
This is actually just a phase out of older chips. A year ago Intel did the same with their "low end" 865 chipsets. At the time, 865 wasn't really low end.
I am a little surprised CNet spun a regularly scheduled product cycle into "Intel pulling out of the low end market". What about their 945P/G chipsets? Aren't they launching a low end 945GZ chipset in the next few months as well to replace 915P/G? Little details that don't make for very interesting headlines I suppose....
HJ
I just built a system around a dual-core Pentium D 3ghz chip for a bud. A few months ago I built a system around the 3.4 GHz HT chip. The CPU fan on the dual-core machine runs about twice as fast and is REALLY noisy! This is on an intel board, and their hardware monitor software says everything is fine. I gotta say, though, he's happy with the speed.
Well, get rid of your Intel stock. Now that they don't have time for the cheap, simple chips, I really think their days are numbered. Any time a large company abandons the low end, it is a sign that they are not hungry anymore and can't be bothered with innovation, since it typically happens from the low end and migrates to the higher end product lines later. Think about RISC processors. One of the big draws to them was the fact that they are very cheap, fast, dumb devices. Even though everyone thinks they are expensive because they were found in Macs and high end workstations, the bottom end of the chipsets were typically found in routers, switches and imbeded systems. For example, I have a router card from a 3Com Total Control router platform with a PPC 601 chip, an audio generator with a Motorola DSP-56001 (OK, so it was never used in a workstation, but you get the idea), and I know that Cisco has been using r5000 processors for years. Even though they aren't sexy products, they all have more power than they need and can be a great way to have engineers squeeze performance out of inexpensive chips. This will lead upwards, as the Pentium processor proved. After all, the Pentium has RISC like architecture and that most likely would not have happened without the low end chips being able to do summersaults within the constraints put in place.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
From the CNET News.com article:
Does CNET even know about 945GZ and 945PL? The article seems to be implying that, after the current low-end chipsets are phased out, Intel will exit the low-end chipset business. Are 945GZ and 945PL being cancelled? If not, will supplies of current low-end chipsets run out months before 945GV and 945PL ship in volume?TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
just gone through this scenario myself... wanted to up the ram on my old P4 and found that it was cheaper to get a new mobo, cpu and other ram type than it was to get an extra 128MB of the crappy rambus ram on the existing board... Now does anyone need another 128MB of rambus ram??? comes with free mobo and 1.4GHz P4???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Okay, that may not have been the intent of the slot processors, but that is what the GP was suggestiong, and in response the on-die l2 allong with a64's onchip memory controller for shear performance issues, would be a step backwards to go to a daughterboard format again.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
If you overflow the stack and overwrite a return value, or taint the variables to be doing what you want, you still get an exploit.
Yes, it's harder. No, it's not a panacea.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Why is the /. mantra that AMD has supply problems, while Intel supposedly has excess capacity? This story outlines Intel's current shortages, even though the PR guy spun it like it's just a regular occurance...
/. numerous times, while stories about AMD opening a new fab don't even get a mention?
Why do stories about Intel opening a new fab get posted to
I get the feeling this story wouldn't be here if the submitter had made it about Intel's supply problems, rather than the retirement of a few low-end chips?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
All it takes is one call from WilliamSoft Chief Architect William H. Gates III and Wintel suddenly decided that low end hardware which does not support Vista will no longer be manufactured.
Gee who didn't see that one coming?
shear performance issues
So we're testing chips in wind-tunnels now to determine how aerodynamic they are?
No, no, no. We're testing scissors by seeing how easily they cut through processors.
I'll take it :)
ohh... do I have to buy it off you? Damn.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
A 17" flatpanel for $100 would be a steal.
Though a little high, $100 for a 17" top of the line monitor like a Sony Trinitron isn't that bad of a deal. It'll sure beat those $70 new no-name monitors with a crappy picture that'll make your eyes bleed.
However, I did pay only $138 for a IBM brand 21" monitor with a Trinitron tube in it. Nice screen.
too late... I turned it into a distro test box... 128MB is a good amount of RAM for stressing Linux distros with... especially KDE or Gnome based ones these days.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.