AMD / Intel Hybrid Motherboard

batgirl writes "ECS has taken advantage of their recent merger with PC Chips and released an interesting take on motherboards. Using the highly portable SiS chipsets, they were able to create a motherboard that supports all kinds of processors across all platforms. The PF88 starts as an Intel socket 775 motherboard, but different expansion cards can be purchased to add support for everything from a Socket 939 Athlon64 to a Socket 479 Pentium-M. The price is right, and performance is as good as can be expected. But how many people would make use of this?"

Comments

Not me

[fuzzy12345]

I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV

Re:Not me

[gbulmash]

I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV

So much is built onto the mainboard now... USB, firewire, support for various forms of DDR, sound, LAN... These don't change as often as CPUs, but they change.

Of course, this is meant to be a budget board, or at least they're using budget chipsets. The best I can see is that it provides whitebox manufacturers more flexibility. Use whatever CPU is on hand.

- Greg

What's the point?

[scsirob]

This has been done before, and even today you can buy adapters to get next-generation CPU's working on older motherboards. However, most of these hybrids have to make trade-offs that do not benefit the end-user. It would benefit ECS for economy of scale, but end-users would always be stuck with proprietary expansion modules that may or may not be available anymore by the time they want to change CPU.

IMO you're better off selecting the mobo+CPU that fits your needs today, and by the time you need to upgrade just select a new mobo+CPU du jour..

The article stated it well

[Gactaculon]

The article summarized this idea well by calling it "a solution without a problem". The whole thing is just so amazingly ill-considered that it's very hard to take it seriously. The only need I could see for something like this is if someone with a P4 needed PCI-E now, and _also_ knew that they wanted to go AMD later. Even then, would they put up with buying a $50 expansion board and running their expensive new processor on that hacked solution?? If PCChips/ECS want to be ambitious, why not endeavor to bring affordable SMP to the masses? Even if the server-classed chips required are expensive, many people must be put off by $300, server-oriented mainboards. This way, they could grab some serious attention in the high-end market and gain credibility. What they're doing now is only going to leave people scratching their heads...

Re:Not me; Oh but it is

[wondafucka]

I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
If this company has done it's job right, this should reduce the overall cost of the board. If vendors have to keep fewer types of boards around then they are buying fewer types, giving them a price break. By having one mainboard that is common to all daughterboards, the total cost of delivering the motherboard is cheaper (one hopes).
My two cents.

good for OEMs

[smash]

Worried about the competition between Intel/AMD leaving one of the product lines un-fashionable?

Buy bulk in motherboards that will support both.

No dead stock you can't shift anymore.

Regardless of the performance, the words "AMD" or "Intel" is enough to sell things to most of the Joe public...

smash.

Remember ALR?

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of my old ALR 386. The processor was on a card, with the idea that you didn't need to replace the motherboard to upgrade, only the CPU card.

When I wanted to upgrade to a 486, the CPU card cost more than a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

There are two problems with the CPU card approach. The first is technical; new generations of processors are coupled with new generations of chip sets, and often, new RAM technology.

The second problem is economic; without a CPU card standard, you are locked into a specific vendor for upgrades. The vendor has no incentive to price the upgrade any less than just below replacement cost for the entire MB, CPU, and RAM package.

If this system had come out not too long ago, you'd be locked into PATA instead of SATA, slow RAM, and AGP instead of PCIe graphics. The CPU and MB should always be treated as a unit, and sufficient RAM should be purchased from the beginning, so memory upgrades should be fairly unusual. Graphics card, hard drive, and optical drive upgrades may make sense; not always, not for everyone, but often enough to consider.