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."

Comments

Now when you say "security"

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

Re:Now when you say "security"

[TCaM]

They are talking about the former, while thinking about the latter.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[KillShill]

seeing as how apple doesn't want to let you install osx anywhere you see fit, i would guess it is also security for apple.

please don't mistake their DRM-lite as anything but bad for the end user.

yeah it's their os and they can do anything they want but that doesn't change my views about them.

let's try to be consistent.

all media companies are heading towards DRM, against the wishes of their REAL users. the crap that MS is pulling is fucking unbelievable but not surprising. the slides/info came from an intel presentation years ago (i still have them saved).
i have no doubt apple will follow. i mean after all, even ibm and amd are part of the INSIDIOUS COMPUTING initiative.

there's nowhere left to run in high performance home computing. transmeta is/was a DRM's wet dream. VIA has no chance to compete in the mid to high end where most people would want to go.

don't praise any implementation of DRM, it doesn't do anyone any good and hurts end users. there is NO GOOD DRM. DRM always means against the wishes of the user. if you don't want your god damn content to be copied, don't release it. making users pay for all the enormous amounts of crippling technology, directly and indirectly is a spit in our faces. i know i won't be taking it anymore.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[Tackhead]

> 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"?

The latter. You are not the customer, and neither Intel nor AMD are the vendors.

Microsoft is the vendor. Intel and AMD are the customers. The guy who actually sits behind the keyboard is the product.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy a movie in 2007, DRM will not affect you. It will play in your movie player just fine. If you pirate that movie, DRM will make your life difficult.

The elementary DRM in DVDs already make many impositions on me which go far, far beyond whether or not I can pirate the movie. (Though, strangely enough, they don't stop me from pirating movies.)

I would just about guarantee HD-DVD or whatever we're buying movies on in 2007 will be along the same lines with the DRM. Lots of limitations on fair use, or reasonable uses of the product you have purchased. No penalties for pirates.

Live with it.

Why?

The software industry has demonstrated themselves not to be someone worthy of being given absolute power.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[Em Adespoton]

I'm sorry, but I bought a lot of games in the 90's that are now unplayable. Why? Because the copy protection scheme made it "impossible" to make a backup of the game, so when the media died, the game was gone. This despite the fact that they insisted that they sold me a license, not a copy of the game. I still own the license, but I can no longer play the game.

The problem with the new DRM schemes is not that they currently stop me from using what I purchased, but that I have no say in how long I continue to have that right. If you buy a product with DRM, you're really renting the product, with the length of rental being variable, based on the lifetime of the rest of your equipment, or the desire of the DRM management company to let you have the product, whichever ends first.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[vmfedor]

Personally, I think DRM hurts end users because you essentially have to prove to it that you're not a criminal every time you use your media. Right now it's assumed that you bought it. Once DRM is implemented it will be assumed that you stole it and you'll have "authorize" your media to prove otherwise.

I believe that it's our right as humans to be given the choice to be a criminal. DRM is bad for everyone because it chips away at the dwindling stone that is our basic human freedoms. Remember, you're not going to wake up one day and be enslaved in some Orwellian labor camp... tiny compromises like these will add up over a long period of time.

Re:Now when you say "security"

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I said, the sense of entitlement you fools have is simply amazing. No, it doesn't belong to you -- quit pretending like it does.

Yes it does. I bought it.

Trusted computing?

[Lehk228]

anyone know if the remaining chipsets will contain the Trusted Computing chips?

Re:Trusted computing?

[KillShill]

simple, whenever there is mention of "security", they're talking about TCPA/DRM/Insidious computing.

hmm..

[aztracker1]

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.

Its all about the Benjies

[BigMFC]

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

Re:Its all about the Benjies

[mpapet]

It does seem sensible, -today-.

For tomorrow, are they abandoning the price point?

If they are abandoning the price point because it's not rich enough for them, I think they've planted the seeds for yet another american powerhouse company to fail in 20 years or less.

Unfettered and unwatched competition in the low-end will clobber them one day soon. I don't care how many uptainiums and Pentium M's they've got and how big their lead may be.

A different way of saying it is that Intel needs to know how to make low-cost chips and effectively compete in these low margin high-volume segments. To be lean-and-mean like their competitors in this space is mandatory. Plus, the volume helps their more expensive product remain profitable.

Re:Its all about the Benjies

[NubKnacker]

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

The margins are enough to sustain the market for the chipsets. I'm from a third world country and the market here is flooded with such sets.

The problem isn't Intel itself but the vendors and the number of computer illiterate. Vendors easily pass off these low-end chipsets as 'high quality and the latest from Intel'. Remember, it's easier for a vendor to provide these simply because he can stock more with less investment.

Another problem is the lack of competition, Intel has become synonymous with chipsets around these parts. AMD and SiS are nowhere to be seen. When I went to buy a new puter, I couldn't get a single vendor (out of the 10 or so I went too), to sell me an AMD chipset with warranty, they said it simply wasn't possible and even if my chipset did go bust I'd have to wait 3 months for a replacement, not something I'm ready to do.

Remember Celeron? It's still passed off as a P4 in these parts.

yeah

[hjf]

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).

Re:yeah

[piecewise]

This really doesn't make much sense. THe point is that Intel is making this move to bump out low margin chips in an effort to sell higher margin chips while their fabs are at capacity. They won't be able to grow much unless they do this -- meanwhile, they are building many new plants. This is a smart move. Let the markets in these areas develop, and then in a few years move in with solid price cuts.

Re:yeah

[moosesocks]

last time I checked, AMD was making every attempt possible to escape the chipset business. Intel doing the same isn't exactly news to my ears, other for the fact that intel sells a fair number of chipsets.

personally, I don't see why this is a bad move at all. I personally like AMD's strategy:

release a mid-range/high-end chipset when moving to a new architecture or introducing a significant new technology (DDR comes to mind), and then let Ali, SiS, nVidia, ATI, and Via copy it. This encourages innovation, competition, and cost-cutting among the various chipset makers, resulting in better chipsets.

all that put aside, AMD's essentially killed the concept of a chipset by integrating the primary functions of the northbridge into their Hammer core. All that's left is the southbridge, and anybody can make those, as they're hardly cpu/architecture-specific.

Why doesnt the summary mention...

[imsabbel]

that intels chipset fab are at their limit and they are simply dropping their lowest margin products?
(its even in the article)

Re:Why doesnt the summary mention...

[DigiShaman]

Simple, because Slashdot gains readership through controversy. While a great deal of the subjects posted is warranted for controversy, this issue does not given the obvious as you so mentioned.

Where is the honor and dignity of journalism these days?

Re:When for a general purpose mainboard and chipse

[aztracker1]

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.

Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[putko]

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.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[guacamole]

I think you're mostly right with the car industry analogy except for this.

Already Chrysler is history, and we are all just wondering whether Ford or GM will be next to go.

Perhaps Chrysler is a history as an independent US corporation but it is not history in its function as the North American branch of Daimler Chrysler after merging (some say being taken over by) with Mercedes Benz. Last year, was the first year Chrysler not only finished in blue ink but they also turned a decent profit. And recently (before the loss making discounts of GM and Ford) they were the only company to gain a significan market share together with some Japanese and Korean rivals. This revival is probably due to introduction of a few new attractive models such as Crysler 300M or Dodge Charger (which surely were designed with the help of their German bosses). This demonstrates that even North American car makers and strive and make profits as long as their design cars that don't suck.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[Chad Page]

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.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[Zackbass]

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.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[timeOday]

It's not just the price; European cars have real quality problems. When VW and Porsche lose out to Kia, something is wrong. And Hyundai beat Mercedes Benz.

Now I have heard the excuse that customers of fine automobiles are simply more finicky, so the direct comparison is unfair. But look who's at #1 - Lexus.

Re:Reminds me of GM/Ford/Chrysler

[Profane MuthaFucka]

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.

Re:When for a general purpose mainboard and chipse

[DogDude]

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!

Could be a good thing,

[ratatask]

This might turn out good, as it hopefully will allow the "high" end chips to be manufactured and sold in bigger quantities.
Which ought to lead to cheaper prices.
More bang for the buck for /us/.

At least part of it is for the end user

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Whatever.

[Council]

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.

FSB licensing vs. in-house production.

[epiphyte(3)]

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.

Re:A very large, empty market.

[42Penguins]

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.

Intel is Low End

[krakrjak]

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.

Re:Intel is Low End

[warkda rrior]

I wan't my servers to use the least amount of power

We have a winner for "Most Creative Spelling Mistake."

Re:A very large, empty market.

[InfiniteWisdom]

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.

Sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Not quite true...

[Hack Jandy]

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

...and why doesn't the article mention 945GZ/PL?

[MojoStan]

The CNET article doesn't even mention the upcoming Intel chipsets (945GZ and 945PL) that are supposed to replace the current low-end chipsets that are being phased out, according to a July 12 DigiTimes article:

• 945GZ: GMA 950 graphics w/o PCI Express x16 slot. Replaces 910GL and 915GL. Samples being delivered to motherboard makers in late July. Volume shipments in 4Q05 or 1Q06.
• 945PL: Low-end version of 945P. Replaces 915PL. Samples delivering July or August. Volume shipments in September 2005.

From the CNET News.com article:

The move, expected to take place by the end of August, could delay shipments of low-end PCs from various manufacturers for a couple of months.

Sources close to the chipmaking giant's dealings confirmed reports that Intel would shutter production of its 910GL, 915GL and 915PL chipsets.

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?

Supply Problems...

[evilviper]

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...

Why do stories about Intel opening a new fab get posted to /. numerous times, while stories about AMD opening a new fab don't even get a mention?

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?