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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"?
simple, whenever there is mention of "security", they're talking about TCPA/DRM/Insidious computing.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
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?
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.
exactly, while AMD (Toyota/Honda) are cranking out faster fabs (hybrid vehicles mass-produced at lower cost), Intel (GM/Ford/Chrysler) are cranking out bigger and bigger chips (SUVs).
and then they wonder where the market went.
look, when I was buying my current laptop, I realized the main limits on my using it were:
1. wireless speed
2. battery life
3. memory
4. how many firewire/USB ports I could use
So I ended up spending $800 on a reconditioned AMD 3300 chip based eMachine with 11b/g wireless and 512MB of RAM and tons of ports - instead of the Dell that I initially was looking at (with a faculty discount even) which was almost twice that.
Still has WinXP, still has the apps I cared about, and my wireless is faster than my DSL and cable modem, so I'm ditching one of the two (just for backup and my other boxen).
Same for chips.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Sorry, but...
They're phasing out chipsets, not processors.
There's still Sis, Via, and all that good stuff in that market.
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.
Intel has a lower margin line - the Celeron - which they make out of every generation of chips. and they lack the capacity to make enough chipsets partially because they used the Centrino marketing campaign to get their chipsets in a higher percentage of notebooks...
As for a car analogy - right now Intel is making a line of very highly efficient, high MPG^Wpower-per-watt chips (the Pentium-M) and a line of gas^Wpower guzzling Pentium 4's. There are two main reasons that they haven't put the P4 aside yet - high megahertz (although not nearly as high as projected), and lower floating point/multimedia performance.
AMD's Athlon 64 is in the middle - more power consumption than the P-M, but it has the media performance that the P-M lacks so it can keep up with the P4 better.
The scary thing for AMD will be when Intel comes out with Merom/Conroe next year... Conroe will have even higher performance per mhz than the current Pentium-M, good if not very high performance per watt, and overall likely be something that will give AMD real fits. And it's quite possibly why Apple's switching to Intel.
There's a reason that the American auto industry in such a bad situation now and it doesn't have anything to do with low margin vehicles.
The big American car companies can't engineer themselves out of a paper bag.
That's all. There's no excusable reason why a Ford should be expected to need serious repairs at half the milage of a Toyota of the same price. That, and the Toyota will have a better fit and finish. The only reason the citadel has been breached is because the domestic manufacturers tore down the walls and make it into a crackhouse.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
People who don't know AMD are also probably the people who listen to whatever the Bestbuy salesmen tell them, and are convinved they need the latest and greatest PC out there to run IE.
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.
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
Detroit needs to understand one thing: When carmakers focus on quality, the customers focus on ugly.
GM might make some very great quality cars, but they also make some very ugly cars, some "inoffensive" cars, and no beautiful cars. GM is going to be uglied to death.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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...
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?
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