Slashdot Mirror
Is Intel Planning To Kill Enthusiast PCs?
OceanMan7 writes "According to a story by Charlie Demerjian, a long-time hardware journalist, Intel's next generation of x86 CPUs, Broadwell, will not come in a package having pins. Hence manufacturers will have to solder it onto motherboards. That will likely seriously wound the enthusiast PC market. If Intel doesn't change their plans, the future pasture for enthusiasts looks like it will go to ARM chips or something from offshore manufacturers."
why would any "enthusiast" go for an ARM CPU with about one tenth of the power a current Intel CPU has? I call this story b/s.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
AMD is down, but not out yet. A boneheaded move like this for Intel could be a boon for AMD.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Such an idiotic move will only serve to drive the enthusiast market towards AMD, which might keep AMD's head above water. Intel wants nothing less, because a world without AMD is a world where Intel gets to face some fun monopoly suits.
Between the increasing popularity of tablets and laptops, I suspect the days of building your own desktop PC have been numbered for a long time now.
Besides, how can you geeks be forced to upgrade your whole computer every few years if you keep stubbornly refusing to play ball by doing things one component at a time? Not to mention the fact that self-built PC's can't be locked down behind a software walled garden and saddled with god-knows-what mandatory crapware, spyware, advertisements, etc. Shit, I even hear some of you are installing other OS's besides Windows and OS X on some of those goddamn contraptions.
You geeks need to be taught to conform better, obviously.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Weren't all those slot-X processors pretty much just pinless processors soldered to a small PCB? Seems like it could be something of an opportunity to me.
WTF does sockets have to do with PC enthusiasm?
When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard? Never?
If a soldered on chip allows the bus to run faster, I for one am enthusiastic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't think I have ever seen an ARM processor in a socket (discounting my old Archimedes, that is).
ARM chips are socketed now?
As long as I can still buy the CPU and mobo separately, I don't mind soldering it myself :)
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily... sounds like more of a cost cutting measure for intel... after all, they're in the business of making chips, not putting them in to a nice plug'n'play package for easy swapping.
Oh well, sounds like 1 step in the system building process (fitting the chip in its slot and locking it down) will be taken out of the equation.
Other than that, the system building process should be much the same as if one were to buy a motherboard + cpu combo (with the
cpu already installed). Although having said that, I will admit that symbolically the installation of the cpu onto the motherboard was
the equivalent of driving the first spike in a railroad and that system building won't be the same without it.
He's got a spotted history of being right with previous work whilst rallying haters like no other tech journalist I've ever read. To the best of my knowledge he's never been sued successfully and he's pissed off some of the biggest names in the business. Here's hoping he's got this wrong or it's bad news for all of us....
why this guy whines the PC would be dead by such a move? those that change CPU are a very very tiny niche and there is no money to be made pandering to them for any multi-billion dollar corporation. just a bunch of troublesome warranty voiders from Intel's point of view. The desktop PC is an appliance to most. soldering in the CPU cuts cost and makes for easier modular replacement with less troubleshooting if something goes wrong. I'm surprised its 2012 and this wasn't done a decade ago.
AMD shill?
That sounds legitimate to me. Definitely quote it!
As much as I don't like Intel, you can still socket a Ball Grid Array chip, there just are no pins to push down.
will be getting a lot more RMAs. Now where did I put that soldering gun?
Legend has it that when Intel first showed the 4004 to the Navy, one of the Admirals said something like, "A computer on a chip is nice, but how do you repair it?" He was thinking that you'd use micro-tweezers and soldering irons to fix bad chips, instead of just replacing them wholesale.
There are many CPUs that are only available as a PC board with several chips. I can envision a day when the whole motherboard is the unit of replacement.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Despite Charlie's ravings that too often make it to the frontpage, the lack of the lga package does not guarantee cpus stuck directly to motherboards
As an enthusiast, I have built *ALL* of my PCs since the 1990's. Intel CPUs haven't had pins for a long time. Just because they may (or may not) be abandoning LGA, doesn't mean there will be no sockets.
Don't believe everything you read.
Hard? Can I not have the option to solder and re-solder whatever chip I want to the board? What if Intel and AMD are smart enough to just standardize their sockets before they exit the high end market and we get to do whatever it is we want with the pin-outs?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no"
I hate sigs.
At least we can say goodbye to one of every system builder's nightmares (among many possible nightmares): bent/broken pins.
Seems like a nightmare for them. Now they will have to try to manage demand and inventories based on desired cpu. Or will Intel remove some options off the table and say this is what you will get?
You can't take one particular configuration of one processor and assume that Intel is trying to kill the enthusiast PC. Guess what, the atom processors in phones are soldered down too, oh no, enthusiast PC dead. If you want to know if Intel is going to kill the enthusiast market just ask whether or not it makes them money.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Don't underestimate the cost of hanging all of that golden plated little pins under your costly chip. Not to mention the cost of the socket itself on the motherboard. My cheap Atom330 MB has the processor soldered in it.
It's a calculated move. They know they will loose some market to the competition, but they bet they will expand their business enough to compensate.
Since the current PC market are already reaching saturation, it appears to me that they also wants to reduce the current life span of the computers as well.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
They're whining because the next generation of CPUs will be soldered onto the board. Well, of course. This is the system on a chip era. Everything else is soldered onto the board. Why not the CPU?
The bigger concern is that without serious competition from AMD, Intel is raising prices.
The way things are going it is just a matter of time before anything even vaguely customizable isn't outright illegal.
It really feels like there is a conceited effort by the big manufacturers to kill off the PC.
First you have all these locked down toy cellphones, and tablets, laptops with proprietary parts, desktops with fewer and fewer customization options, and even Windows 8's Metro crap seems to put a nail in the coffin of hope that we might see larger higher resolution desktop displays. (Guess I will be holding on to my old CRT)
It is surprising that it is even still possible to buy individual motherboards and parts rather than complete desktop systems. THANK YOU GAMERS!
At least a few key PC players found out from SemiAccurate a few months ago, and they were rather incredulous about the news.
That's their source on this, so it's basically pure speculation off of an off-handed source, brilliant. As a manufacturer and engineering firm, Intel probably has 100s of projects in the pipe at any given time doesn't mean they're about to kill the PC lol. Also builders (PC enthusiasts in TFA) are a bit more resourceful than TFA's I've-never-built-a-pc-in-my-life writer gives credit for.
NERD RAGE!!!! RAWRRRRR
Seriously I need a fucking grain of salt to swallow this one.
I doubt this will be the end of the enthusiast PC market. But it does sound like a good opportunity to start a business that sells user-customized soldered motherboard/cpu combos.
Socket and see :)
The comments that point out that most people always buy a new mobo when they buy a CPU are missing the real problem. Soldering the CPU on the mobo decreases flexibility which will either result in fewer choices for CPUs on a given mobo or will require mobo manufacturers to make more SKUs. Either way we loose. More than likely it will be the former as the mobo manufacturers aren't running with tons of margin.
I generally have upgraded my CPU and mobo at the same time (mostly because of Intel's propensity to change sockets every time they change their underwear forces me to). I have very specific aims when I choose my mobo and CPU combinations. I suspect that my choices wouldn't be your choices. Hence having reduced flexibility in the form of fewer choices will probably make all but the main stream unhappy.
It just means more business for the guys in mainland China and Taiwan.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
.AMD make better CPUs anyway
What definition of "better" are you using here...?
Good thing I was a solder monkey for five years. I can solder anything on a mobo.
Bah. Real enthusiasts use discrete transistors.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Doesn't seem to me like such a big deal, CPU upgrades never were that practical to begin with as anything that was significantly faster then the last one would need a new motherboard anyway. All the PCs I ever bought stayed with the same CPUs and never got upgrades. It's the RAM, HDDs and cards that get upgraded and swapped. Biggest problem I would think would be fried motherboards, which would get more expensive to replace.
The last time I upgraded a CPU with out a new motherboard was my 486DX-33 to a 486DX2-66. I don't see this as being a big deal
Intel has mastered the art of producing microprocessor chips that communicate with the bus by metal telepathy? (Or would that more properly be metaloid telepathy?) Very cool. Was wondering how long it would take to do this.
The story may be a teaser, but that's how the world works.
Eventually you can't buy a better Coke (no matter how much money you have).
We're getting past the age of people building their own X (where X=PC in this case).
All your ghosts are just false positives.
Right now when I build a PC I can pick motherboard X and processor Y, getting the price/features/performance combination I want. If this does go through the choices we have a consumers will be greatly reduced I would guess.
There are sockets available for CPU packages that don't have pins. I work with one type of them every day.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The Yugo!
When the water pump died you replaced the whole engine. GENIUS!!!
Bang for buck, maybe?
I still think AMD's got the edge, there.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Of all the components, these are the two I least care about being fused together.
Why? Simple, the most common (internal) components for me to swap out on a system, either for repair or upgrade, are video card, memory and disk, in that approximate order. (CPU heat sinks might make the list, but thats only because I tend to be foolish enough to think that THIS TIME, the included heat sink will be sized appropriately for the CPU)
Generally, by the time I am thinking I need more base CPU, it makes more sense to move to a newer generation of CPU with a new socket and thus, new motherboard. I would almost say the same about RAM, on average I upgrade the amount of memory in a system once, and have had to swap out many more sticks of memory than CPUs.
All in all, the CPU/mb is about the only set of components that I neither carry on to the next machine, nor upgrade in the same machine, nor find unreliable enough to need replacement.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I can see some company step up and for an extra price will solder those to a board with pins. If done right the cost should not be too much. But it is sad that Intel would not think that there was a thriving inventive market out there providing new ideas and invention using their technology.
Look, if you give an credence at all to the idea that corporations look as far into the future as they can and attempt to the limits of their ability to arrange that future so they control as much of it as they can, then it's worthwhile thinking about what Intel is gunning for here.
IT also helps to remember that the direction of corporations are decided by a small circle of individuals who all , uh, know each other.
What they want is a world in which there are no *smart* terminals , just dumb ones whose owners are forced to offer up all their data to "the cloud" for processing and , um... examination.
Giving people serious computing power was the worst thing to ever happen in the eyes of people who want to have all the power all the time. Intel is one of those "people" and the people who work closely with Intel to plan the future are also of like mind.
The general purpose computer , not to say computing. is just too powerful to be given over to just anyone. They want to backpedal on this, but need to make that backpedaling look like "progress". So we have "cloud computing" and the planned demise of powerful, general purpose CPU chips under the control of individuals. Helps if you wipe other chip makers off the face of the earth through unsavory and illegal business practices also. Intel has a decades long history of such.
http://ftc.gov/opa/2010/08/intel.shtm
about a quarter of the way down the page:
http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=137874
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Competition.2C_antitrust_and_espionage
and so on for as long as you care to look.
If you care about owning general purpose computers, just don't buy Intel chips. AMD chips are more than fast enough for everything including all your games. That's the solution. Intel depends on you more than you depend on them.... so far.
...are able to solder. In fact having to solder something usually makes it more entertaining for them.
For about the last ten years every time I've upgraded my CPU I've upgraded the motherboard as well because there's no point putting a new CPU into an old motherboard.
Why in the name of The Flying Spaghetti Monster would enthusiasts move to ARM?
Yeah. ARM is fine for mobile devices. And might be fine for small form-factor HTPC setups.
But for the power-gamers? They wouldn't deign to wipe their asses with an ARM chip.
This is what leads me to believe the author may be smoking something.
We already see systems with discrete CPUs and systems with soldered CPUs. The current LGA format allows for either.
So why would this change to solely soldered in the next generation?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
or a smart group of people (motherboard mfgs) will put the chips on board/another chip and sell them and sell them for extra $$$. But as the world is so anti-Capitalistic these days it won't happen.
Should be: Is Intel Planning To Kill Enthusiast Intel PCs?
From TFA: "Unfortunately Intel doesn’t care about the enthusiast, and unsurprisingly they have moved on." Can I getta Like Duh? "Like, Duh!"
I woudn't expect enthusiasts, whatever the author means by that, to be much of a percentage overall, but this does seem to be a business opportunity for someone.
A technical question to which I didn't see the answer in TFA: Even chips that are intended to be soldered to the board (probably some variation of current surface mount techniques) can be mounted in (sometimes specialized) sockets. This raises the question, is something in Intel's business agreements requiring MB manufacturers to solder the chips to the board?
And finally, I don't see where this makes much difference to the rank and file. Computer components have gotten cheap enough that it's fairly common to put the fastest or near-fastest currently available proc in the board to start with, as upgrade protection. And then, when you need more grunt, you'll increasingly find that no new procs were ever developed for that chipset, so you need to upgrade the motherboard again anyway. Besides, other than gamers and specialized applications (photo and video manipulation for instance) most people have more resources than they can really use even with the cheapest currently available motherboard/cpu combo.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If this happens, it will be using BGA pads which is fairly difficult to solder at home.
It surprises me that Intel would be considering soldered CPUs.
I thought that the big "secret sauce" of Intel's marketing was their dozens of different SKUs with their slightly different features and price points -- slicing and dicing the market into lots of little segments for maximum profit.
It seems like a socketed CPU would be highly desirable to implement this strategy.
Look at the Intel x86 CPU product sheet -- it's got many, many dozens of SKUs. If mainboard manufacturers have to solder in the CPU, then I would think that a majority of those SKUs would get little or no sales, as the mainboard manufacturers settle on their favorite few CPUs to solder in. I don't see how that would help Intel.
It strikes me that the people who would have the most to lose in this would be third party mainboard makers and then closely right behind them, major PC manufacturers.
The former cater to the builder, enthusiast and whitebox market. It would be a lot harder for them to supply enough variety -- my last build I spent a lot of time figuring out which of the CPU options I wanted, and that was just sticking with Core-i5 (I've built plenty of systems, but I don't spend a lot of time monitoring the endless releases of CPUs and chipsets, so I had some catching up to do). If these vendors had to keep mainboards on hand for every possible variation that would be difficult.
I can also see major PC manufacturers disliking this, even at their level of assembly automation. Dell charges incrementally more money for better CPUs and offers a half-dozen choices on most systems. They would probably handle this at board assembly versus soldering on the CPU. And then what about warranty work? It'd be a lot more expensive for them to swap entire system boards with CPUs -- most of the time when I've dealt with this, they swap motherboards but keep the CPU.
What seems like a decent compromise would be some kind of adapter that CPUs could be soldered onto and then a companion slot for this adapter. A consortium of interested parties could make it a standard so that you'd have similar levels of portability between boards that you have now with socketed CPUs. It seems like reinventing the wheel since we're already at that point and it kind of reminds me of Slot 1 CPUs from the PII and P3 days.
Smells like FUD written by a tablet enthusiast.
They're eliminating the socket, so the motherboard and CPU are a package deal now.
What harm does this do?
Well, it makes it impossible to upgrade the CPU without upgrading the motherboard. That's effectively already the case for Intel processors. They only maintain socket compatibility for one generation. Nehalem boards worked under Westmere, Sandy Bridge boards worked under Ivy Bridge, and so on. They don't really keep compatibility long enough for processors to get significantly more powerful, so there's relatively little incentive to upgrade the CPU while keeping the same motherboard.
Yes, it impacts people who want to upgrade from a low-end processor to a high-end. And repairs - if the CPU gets fried, you can't just replace it, and not the mobo. But I would not consider these particularly common circumstances.
So what's the upside?
A slight decrease in price ($10-20 or so, I would venture). A bit more reliability - no more bent pins. It might cut down on the often-crazy number of slightly different models.
Ultimately, it comes down to a move that's a major inconvenience for a very small number of users, a minor problem for a small group, and a minor gain for the majority. And that's just within the enthusiast community - everyone who would never upgrade their processor is in the same "small-gain-no-loss" boat as the enthusiasts who upgrade both their CPU and mobo every 2-3 years or so.
This guy makes up shit left and right and passes it off as truth.
What I see happening is a third party coming up with a pre-soldered solution on some type of standard pinset. Enthusiasts are not going to just accept a soldered only solution - the market will drive innovation and come up with a proper solution.
We have several hundred HP servers running Intel, and we do get the occasional bad processor. I'm sure HP would rather just send us a replacement processor, like they do now, rather than having to send a whole new motherboard.
I am inclined to call bull on this idea as a whole. Unless I am underestimating the market for discrete components (and not just those who build their own PC's, but all the enthusiast makers as well such as iBuyPower, Maingear etc) otherwise the OEM motherboard makers should flip out about this. On Newegg right now I can find 15 variations of just Ivy Bridge processors from Intel in various configurations and prices. If I am Asus/MSI then I have to build a motherboard for each of those rather than one board that can support all of them?
I can see this being an option offered for the Dell/HP/Lenovo's of the world who are already accustomed to building machines with soldered chips and have the infrastructure to support it. I cannot think Intel is so clouded as to wipe off a hardcore section of their customer base, even if its a smaller amount of total sales.
The problem here is for the vendors, not the consumers. As a consumer, I, too have always purchased CPU/MB in a pair and I've never upgraded the CPU without upgrading the motherboard. A motherboard's meaningful market life is probably a year, while most upgrades occur at least 2 or 3 years apart. So that's moot.
But the problem is for smaller vendors. Once having been one myself, I'd usually keep a week's stock of motherboards on hand, and somewhat more CPUs on hand, confident that I could meet consumer demands simply by putting the appropriate CPU with the motherboard and hand them something useful.
By soldering CPUs directly to the main board, this modularity is compromised and the cost of delivering numerous options for CPU combos goes up considerably. Now, instead of 10 motherboards and 20 CPUs to offer up to 20 different CPU speeds, a vendor needs to increase inventory overhead in order to maintain a similar selection.
No, not the end of the world, but it may well result in an increase in the desirability of AMD inventory.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Problem solved.
Realize that the PC industry is dying a horrible death then the "enthusiast" crowd probably represents the least significant portion of Intel's market. I don't think Intel is worried about that bottom line when the bottom has been falling out of their market for years.
Having said that there is absolutely no reason for Intel or a 3rd party to build component boards or system-on-a-chip type solutions with soldered CPU's so that enthusiasts can still build a mostly empty shoebox full of wires and 70's era plastic connectors and have the smug sense of accomplishment that their $2000 box of hand-picked components will perform better then the $500 box of the same components sold by Dell or HP.
Also enthusiasts should realize that state-of-the-art these days is something that fits into a 3mm thin package, not a box with 20 cubic feet of hot air and dust.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
As someone who regularly repairs laptops (including a lot more processor swaps than you would think), this sucks. It will inevitably increase the cost of every service, thus shrinking my customer base and causing what little profits I have to dry up, forcing me to either get rid of overhead (since I do this on my own, in a home-based shop, there isn't a whole lot to cut), or just shut down the operation completely.
I will use, as an example, a recent proc-swap I did for a friend on his older Dell 1545:
Labor is about $30/hr.
Intel Core 2 Duo T4200 = ~$30, installed in an hour.
Inspiron 1545 motherboard = ~ $200 (used), installed in about 2 hours.
So, a $60 job now becomes a $300 job, enough to make most of my customers, with their older machines, say, "Fuck that, I'll just go to Wal-Marx and buy a new one for 100 bucks more!"
Thanks for doing your part to destroy small business, Intel.
I hope you fuckers rot.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...that made x86-64 chips. Likely named with a 3-letter abbreviation that starts with A. Oddly enough, they even developed the 64-bit specification.
Protip: It's definitely not ARM, for fuck sakes.
The implications for model management mean that, for example, if you want a top end i7 but recognize that the 'business' chipset suffices for IO needs, today you can do that. In the future, even if possible you have to find a board vendor that shared your view, and stuck the top end i7 into a 'low end' chipset. Instead, they'll likely forever marry it only to overpriced chipsets that rarely deliver real value.
I never found the top end cpu part compelling myself, but I can easily see the implications for choice resulting in requiring board manufacturers to pre-integrate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I agree, while it sounds like we're loosing "freedom", I personally haven't changed any of my CPUs in any system I've built.
But let's really think about this. You see, the choice is made up front to match a CPU with your favourite MB. So, say today ASUS makes a
MB with the ram slots/sata ports/yada yada configuration that I need/want. I'm free to match it with any CPU I want. Does that mean that in
the future, ASUS will have to make X boards to cover the various CPU chips Intel may offer? Or is Intel really saying that they're going to reduce
the CPU offering to just a small subset of the current variations offered today?
IMHO, I think the real issue is gold. It may not seem like much for one CPU, but they'd save a ton of money by not having to gold plate the pins.
Unfortunately not. AMD's best (Piledriver 8-core FX-8350) is getting it's ass handed to it by Intel's basic i3 parts these days. And I am very disappointed, as I recently "Upgraded" to Bulldozer. Beginning to regret that decision more than a little. :/
Gamers and Graphic Artists aside, the CPU is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think that for many people the most important components are memory and disk drive. I'm running Linux on my 5 year old iMac that I upgraded to a 120GB SSD drive and it flies. I've only got 4GB of memory because that's all it will take, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'm rarely ever using more than 50% of the available memory. It's got a Core2Duo processor, much slower than the i7 or even i5 processors, and it doesn't matter. The current CPU load is 3% on Core 1 and Core 2 is sleeping. On occasion it might spike up to 40% but it's only momentary.
If you are into gaming then sure, you'll want a really good graphics card and a fast CPU. But for the everyday user an i7 is not only unnecessary it's a waste of money. Yes, the ARM processors are woefully slow compared to an i7 but it's good enough for everyday use and it consumes a lot less power which is critical for mobile devices.
For my development work I'm most often connected to a powerful server via Remote Desktop so my CPU is not important - it's the CPU(s) on the server that matter.
I bought a dirt-cheap off-the-shelf PC. Over time I upgraded most of it, including the CPU.
The only original parts are the chassis, power supply, and one of the optical drives. Had the mobo not needed a warranty swap-out, it would still be original.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Might actually make more sense to do the converse. With the pin density of a socket, the parts that would make sense would be CPU BGA soldered to a board with DIMMs and PCI-e slots. Active board components like IOH (along with additional PCIe slots it might bring) and damage-prone parts (like the external connectors) would be on a smaller board that could be swapped out and not really have a lot of pins that need to reach the CPU and with less stringent performance restrictions than PCIe and DIMM slot connected components.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sorry... after reading these posts I thought it was still 1987.....
-CF
I've used AMD hardware for years for the main reason that sockets don't change often. On my old system I upgraded through 4 different CPUs while still using the same motherboard up to the 6 core I run now. About a year ago I replaced everything except the CPU and video card, with the intent of upgrading the CPU when the next gen AMDs come out. I run multiple systems and have upgraded just the CPU or just the motherboard on several over the years. I was seriously considering moving to Intel when I get a new system since AMD is having a hard time of keeping their performance in-line with Intel. I can tell you I definitely won't be doing that now. I spend thousands on computer gear every year and at least for the time being it will continue to go towards CPUs, GPUs, and Chipsets made by AMD.
Underdog, AMD has always been the underdog that plays just as hard as the "Big Boys" and the fact that they can keep it up is what makes them better.
... in fact I'd prefer soldered (as long as it had a good fan), since besides heat, the enemy of electronics is corrosion and bad connections.
Not to mention that sockets are EXPEN$IVE, even when bought in bulk.
And getting modern microwave-frequency data signals across an extra inch of board and through a connector (especially the latter) is very difficult. With the rising speeds, getting a connector out of the path can produce a substantial improvement in signal integrity.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ummm... don't the current core iX line of processors come without pins? The pins are in the socket. The chip just has pads for contact.
Yep were just getting this into the news room. Gabe Newell has confirmed a ARM native version of Steam for Linux based operating systems
I'm beginning to see more and more of a reason for a 'Steam Box' type of customizable console.
It's already been several generations since intel processors have had actual pins. They will still and always have to have some kind of externally accessible connectors (i.e. pads) even just to solder to. All it would take is a different socket that can work with the new design.
How retarded is the original poster? Last time I checked, Intel CPU's DONT have pins anymore. They have contacts on the flat bottom of the chip. I guess the obvious genius must have missed that development.... years ago.
So What? They have had pinless processors for years. I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre that has a pinless P-4 chip on it. You use a socket resembling a BGA that has little springy fingers on it with a clamping device to contact the chip instead of a regular socket. The only time I ever upgrade processors these days is if I buy an already built system and acquire a faster chip.
Desktop processors sometimes do die abruptly.....replacing a cpu and remounting the fan is much easier than yanking out the motherboard as things currently stand. We had this happen on an older workstation with high quality motherboard...after a few years, the cpu starting giving errors..replaced the cpu, all was fine. Replacement CPU was easy to find and cheap....if we had to replace the motherboard, it would have been much more work and also required replacing ram.
Nope they'd much rather charge you a shit load more for a whole new motherboard, just because one part of it broke. That way they get a larger profit.
I'm more concerned about this trend to solder RAM onto boards (Apple, I'm looking at you here.) -- RAM goes bad over time -- a shockingly short time. (google the papers (by google) about RAM failure rates, and what they do after 18 months). After a couple of years error rates go up -- way up. (ECC would very definitely be your friend here, but intel only makes it available on xeon series chips (the circuitry is there but fused off in consumer grade chips) )
My experience has been that after 24 months, you should just toss the ram dimms in the trash and start with new ones -- and you might as well max out the ram at that point. Otherwise the machine starts getting flaky as soft and uncorrected errors happen with increasing frequency.
Ian Ameline
a) Bulldozer sucks, Vishera is quite a bit better but still not where AMD's value is (except for the very attractive FX6300);
b) compare these similarly priced processors: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/675?vs=677 ;
c) referring to item b, remember that the A10 comes with about 3x the graphics capabilities of the i3 (and that the games tested by Anand use a powerful discrete card, so graphics performance is not represented at all).
My first reaction is that this would reduce choice and increase the cost of building a PC. CPU prices are driven by a combination of competition and the marketplace. If the motherboard vendor has to sell CPU/motherboard combinations, someone will have to eat the cost of overruns. That usually ends up being the consumer. This would mean more sales for Intel but higher prices for consumers.
It totally depends on the workload.For virtualization, compiling or rendering the FX-8350 is around i7-3770k levels. And i've measured it myself.
Besides, with amd it's easier to get a working IOMMU setup (with intel it's still a mix-and-match between cpus/motherboards/chipsets/bios revisions to get vt-d functional), which is a selling point for me.
It's quite possible that Intel may want to move to BGA-soldered chips for OEM crap. That stuff already has minimal upgrade options and most users never even crack the case. But a moment's thought makes it clear that this is not going to be a viable option for Intel to implement across the board. For starters, what about the immensely profitable Xeon line? Does anyone really think that this kind of marketing strategy is going to work in the data center?
What seems more likely to me is that Intel is going to consolidate the "enthusiast" and "server" sections of its market. OEM systems will have a relatively small number of motherboard configurations with BGA-soldered processors. Enthusiast-class (K-series) CPUs will be moved to the same chipset as Xeons, and the same motherboards will support both. High-end users can continue to get what they want, while the manufacturers who produce cheap computers to sell at Best Buy will be able to shave a few cents per board off of their production costs.
Incidentally, I would be very skeptical about taking anything that Charlie Demerjian says at face value. It's not that he is never right, but he's so in the tank for AMD that it's not funny.
The trend in computing (and outside as well, but that's offtopic) is to give increased control to the manufacturers and vendors, and less control to the owner. If things continue the way they're going now, in 20 years (if that) I foresee a future where computers (as known by the average person) are black boxes, never to be taken apart for any reason. They'd love to kill off open source too, and they're working on ways to do that (and if such machines become the dominant ones, then it will be done at least in a de facto sense). There will come a day when hobbyist computing and true hacking (as opposed to the popular definition of "illegal shit") will only be possible with "retro" computers. It might be a few years off, but it will happen if things continue on the current course.
FC Closer
sounds like more of a cost cutting measure for intel... after all, they're in the business of making chips, not putting them in to a nice plug'n'play package for easy swapping.
Cost-cutting and/or signal integrity. Signal speeds are getting into microwave frequencies now and getting those through a connector and/or across an extra inch of PC board to get to it (running near and over/under other such signals) is a royal PITA that degrades, slows, and increases the rate of errors in data even when done right.
This doesn't necessarily mean there WON'T be a socketed version. It just means that Intel is punting the socket-and-baby-board design issues downstream rather than imposing their design choices on board manufacturers. Maybe the latter will all solder the chips to the mother boards. Maybe some will design proprietary baby board/socket combos. Maybe some of 'em will come up with a standard. (Maybe AMD will promulgate a standard that includes the ability to mount Intel chips - in order to encourage MOBO makers to build boards that will also accept AMD CPUs.) It's not Intel's problem any more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What we actually know: Intel's current socket is pinless. CPU has small "pins" that are protrusions and do not "socket" into the socket on the motherboard but just get positioned over it. CPU is fixed into socket in a proper position by socket's outer rims, and then locked in with a clasp mounted on the motherboard.
Rumor: Intel is doing away with current socket.
His claim: Intel will solder all CPUs to motherboards.
What will likely actually happen: current socket doesn't have enough space for sufficient number of connections for more complex chips, new socket with similar interface but more connectors then the current one will be implemented. This socket will have a new name. They will stop making chips and motherboards for old socket, hence "will do away with the current socket".
But hey, shock headlines brings advertisement impressions!
Enthusiast ARM computer? Ha ha.
More seriously though how many folks who are "enthusiasts" upgrade CPU or mobo? I'm thinking they probably dump the pair together for an upgrade if they have that kind of money. So in my mind making the cpu a permanent part of the mobo makes sense and can lower cost as well. Sounds like a win to me.
An earlier post made a good point too. Gold has gotten really frick'n expensive. A SMT solder mount does away with that.
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily
Isn't the Intel chip a BGA? Aren't there already a plethora of high-signal-integrity sockets that accept chips in BGA carriers?
This may actually be a non-issue.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
CPUs and motherboards are are disposable. I've never, ever upgraded a CPU on an existing motherboard.
In 20+ years you never had a motherboard fail 1 or two years after your bought it? hell i had one fail at 5 or 6 months! so then I have to desolder the chip? uh no thanks..
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
My first intel was an old Packard Bell "Legend 70 CD Supreme" Pentium 75mhz cpu / 8 meg ram upgraded to 16 meg ram / 4x cdrom and Windows 3.11 upgraded to windows 95 when it released. It eventually got gutted and became a slackware linux box router.
From then on it was either Cyrix or AMD systems then Cyrix disappeared. And all my gaming machines have always been AMD, my last AMD was build in 2005/6ish I forget but was AMD x64 dual core 4600 / 4 gigs ram / EVGA Geforce 9800 GTX+ superclocked edition... Great gaming box but it was getting time to upgrade.
So last month I decided I'd finally try Intel out, I had saved a bit of cash to throw into a "Enthusiast" Intel gaming machine, to play some of those nice DirectX10/11 games that I couldn't play on my AMD system since I was still using Windows XP on it and never got around to getting 7, even though I had Win7 on my laptop.
So my new system is an Intel Core i7-3820 / 32 gigs limited edition intel XMP Patriot ram / 240 gig SSD windows drive / 1.5 TB western digital caviar black data drive/ EVGA Geforce 670 FTW edition superclocked
So hoping it gives me at least 3 to 4 years of gaming "Hopefully"
but now after finally switching to Intel from being hardcore AMD gamer for years kinda pisses ya off to read stories like this, I hate how everyone is all "The desktop is dying" and "Gaming desktops won't exist much longer"
I hate trying to game on a console/television setup or game on a smartphone or tablet.
I like gaming on a desktop... everything else just don't feel natural, the last console I owned was a PS2 and I really never got into it, I HATED gaming on television. And even though yea I could plug it into a LCD or whatnot it just didn't have the same feel as sitting at a gaming desktop, or the power.
Anyhow just my 2 cents
While it does affect upgrades, the more important impact is to reduce the amount of choice when building a system.
If true, it likely means it will be harder to find a high-end cpu on a no-frills motherboard, or a low-end cpu on a fancy motherboard.
It's been some time that Intel's CPU don't have pins anymore, the pins are actually on the motherboard and the socket squeeze both together... So I don't really get it. If there is really something Intel will do to force the manufacturer to solder the CPU to the motherboard, well my reflow station will get handy again! =D But would seriously be costly for manufacturer. If the CPU breaks, you need to change both or to pay someone to do the delicate process of changing the CPU...
Typical 'Intel', as a former employee at NSA (Intelligence services), it's not too much a surprise they are trying to kill off 'enthusiasm'..
Reason: They have a hard time promoting drama which sells their goods and services.....
Most of the problem in motherboard + drop-in-CPU is that some of the pin is bended, or somehow
the user were able to put in an older non compatible CPU and jam it down.
By soldering the CPU to the board, the motherboard+CPU is now tested at the manufacturing plant.
The bad part is that the manufacturer now has to stock those expensive parts. So if ASUS
make a millions motherboard, they have to buy a millions CPU. If they only sell half a million
motherboard, the lost in cost of CPU is HUGE and could wipe out the company.
unused cores most of the time are failed ones that get turned off. Now you may get lucky and get a cpu in a bad batch that has all it's cores good and you just need to unlock it.
This is all about just selling more silicon for Intel, they sell a CPU for every mainboard built (Built not sold) and if your mainboard fails down the line they automatically sell a new CPU and the consumer ends up paying alot more then they had to.
Win win for Intel
windows only will not work for servers / VM's boxes.
Larger BGAs with I/O counts above, say, 600, start to have real quality issues with sockets, especially if there are any significant number of high-speed I/O going out (which is very true for modern Intel CPU).
There are real engineering reasons (thermal, electrical, noise, bad contacts, you name it) to throw out the socket and use hard-soldered solution. I don't know why this is only being considered a lame cost-cutting move.
If Intel were silly enough to try this, 1 day after Intel put out such processors, vendors would be selling em soldered onto an appropriate socket pinout adapter.
At several points in my PC building careers there have been price or manufacturing considerations which have caused "enthusiasts" to buy pinless CPUs. In every case, 3rd parties have supplied "adapter" boards with pre-soldered CPUs with PGAs or whatever to go into standard sockets. What may be missing this time is an official Intel CPU socket to plug into, but I highly doubt companies like ASUS are just going to shrug and abandon the market. They'll either give us a common socket to work from, or just sell boards with pre-soldered CPUs. Whatever. Not worth getting ones panties in a bunch over.
Intel has used code names confusingly in the past. While I have no insider information, I would wager that Broadwell is specifically the embedded/soldered version, and the socketed version has a different name. (Like how the first Core 2 Duo was variously Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest depending on target usage.)
Likewise, they have separate lines for enthusiast vs. mainstream now - Sandy Bridge-EP on Socket 2011 for enthusiast, Sandy Bridge (then Ivy Bridge) on socket 1155 for mainstream. The enthusiast chips may just continue to be repackaged server/workstation chips.
Yes, enthusiasts like having the ability to buy the much-lower-end/cheaper part and crank it up; but there are currently reasonably-priced workstation/server-only chips that could be easily turned into an enthusiast rig with motherboard manufacturer support.
Looking at the performance charts at Passmark the top still looks dominated by AMD. Intel has ramped up performance, but it's ramped up price even more.
you don't want to be forced to buy I7 to get more IO or say more then 1 X16 slot.
I can see intel only makeing boards with X8 X8 or even X16 X16 + X4 with a switch chip only on boards with high end cpus.
sucks if only need low to mid range cpu power but need more IO then say X16 + X4.
If you want to run something like PCI-Express Gen 3 I/O through a socket, good freakin' luck. It is hard enough to do board design with these hypersonic I/O links as it is, even with everything soldered down.
I saw this rumor over here.
The way I read it is that they are going to offer BGA packaging to satisfy the large OEMs (e.g, dell, lenovo, etc). Now that most desktop PC are commodities, offering chips in BGAs reduces motherboad cost by eliminating the cost of the socket, improving yield (can sell kits of chips that just barely work together rather than requiring every component to satisfy the maximum electrical margins), and maybe reduce power (better electrical interface to memory).
My guess is that they will probably still offer a socket for servers and high-end enthusiast PCs, etc, but that means that it will be only specific enthusiast PCs that will support upgrades (e.g, you will not be able to upgrade a commodity desktop PC). So instead of outright killing the enthusiast PCs, I'm guessing Intel is simply going to make dabbling in enthusiast PCs a very expensive hobby (like it was in the old days).
In the old days, basically Intel was "forcing" all the computer vendors to have this latent ability to upgrade which enabled a custom motherboard industry that didn't need to sell-through (buy/resell) expensive CPUs. With this new change, only high-end motherboard companies will remain, and the computer vendors will just JIT motherboards the same way they purchase CPUs and memory. Undoubtly this will force even more consolidation in smaller motherboard form factors (although ATX/BTX/ITX was pretty standard, you saw some variations in the mini-ITX area) and the jellybean components on them (e.g., audio, power-regulators, etc).
What this might do, however, is kill is the desktop motherboard repair small businesses (mom/pop computer repair shops), not the enthusiast PC business. They won't be able to afford to stock motherboards anymore (since they will have CPUs mounted on them). On the other hand, the car repair business evolved around similar issues, most auto repair shops need to same-day order most of the parts need to repair cars from centralized parts distributors (they couldn't afford to stock things), so maybe mom/pop computer repair shops could evolve too... Maybe...
So, I hope they build in hardware that if one CPU fails in a multi-CPU server, the whole machine just keeps chugging along on less CPUs. And every OS had better build in fault-tolerance for this sort of thing, because once upon a time, we had to open the machine and replace failed CPUs on the mobo before the damn thing would even boot. If you had a 4CPU machine and even one went down, it was out until the bad one was replaced. Now you're saying you gotta swap the whole mobo? Really?
Well, Intel may be shooting itself in the foot. Then again, the "enthusiast" market is now starting to grow around the RaspberryPI, and other small systems that have practically unlimited expansion potential (if you're willing to hack) -- so the point is; maybe intel doesn't even see that bright a desktop future -- maybe they've already mapped 10 years down the road, and by Windows9 everyone will be using mobile devices.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
... checking around the web, I found and interesting discussion here (http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/266353-lga-out-after-intel-broadwell.html). One of the off-hand comments was that an enterprising manufacturer could take the solder-only CPU and solder it to a ZIF adapter. It's certainly an interesting, if not feasible, solution...
I would love a 1000 CPU ARM based computer.
Your belief that travelling by flying through the air will never be possible or popular did not stop it happening.
Back when the world was WIntel I bought only AMD and Cyrix. This was partly fuelled because I despised the way Intel created a great chip costing 'x' then crippled it so that they could sell it un-crippled for z. They were the original patent trolls back when it wasn't cool and pretty much forced the hardware cycle. I stopped buying AMD when the dead end street called Socket 939 had exhausted it's usefulness. After that right royal arse-pump I never bought another AMD chip, which for home includes ATI GPU's, for no other reason than I(we) were lied to about that road map. So back with Intel since 2006, I rarely find a reason to upgrade a chip without a motherboard; mostly because the extra work of upgrading the full set, is rewarded by being able to sell the entire working old set at a premium (shifting CPU's second hand is a ball-ache, half the buyers ruin them and blame you). In server world, I have found I run out of memory expansion ability far before CPU cycles.... Anyhoo: The mobo makers can mount the chips easily enough; it will take an awful lot more investment though - which is exactly what Intel wants. If they force a mobo maker to buy and mount their products, then the commitment to sell those products is going to go through the roof. Old Intel tactics; if they really dare. A ramble for my cherry pop - please excuse.
Socket compatibility between different chip designs is getting harder and harder to maintain as I/O system design gets more complex, and so this kind of issue would diminish over time. Pretty soon, the only options at a socket level would be different CPU clock speeds (i.e. same chip design, possibly different chip process) anyways... and if you were really the kind of enthusiast to replace a cpu at socket level, you may not care much for the spec'd chip speed, since you are 50/50 likely going to overclock.
As IT manager for a fairly large org I can say we replace motherboards when they break (and yes, use the same cpu) at least once a month. This would be impossible and we'd have to buy new mb, cpu and probably memory. So I can see why Intel would like this, and why we'd probably go AMD.
Once upon a time you could design and build your own circuts using individual components. Ever since then prices have gone down and integration has gone up. What's New?
The author's a moron. Even if intel did this it would be irrelevant. Asus, MSI and all of the other motherboard manufacturers would see this as a terrible thing... they like people buying and swapping components, it makes them money... so they'd assign 1 engineer to design their own socket and be done with it in a day cause that's all it would take. It's pin for pin after all... even I could do it.
Order the chips, solder them to their own socketed board, resell for a profit... make the female socket design free to use for every other manufacturer on the planet could use it on their boards and keep the male version that holds the chip patented. Now Asus (or whomever) controls the chip market and the price... wow that seems like a terrible idea, why would Intel do that to themselves? Oh wait... they wont.
The issue is high-speed I/O, especially over 10 Gbps stuff, which high-end CPUs are increasingly integrating onto the CPU chip itself. The electrical hurdles of getting these signals through a socket cleanly are immense... and those hurdles mostly remain going through a daughtercard to mainboard connector. There are ways it could be done but it is a lot more complex (and expensive) than you are indicating.
... A journalist so terrible not even the Inquirer wanted him.
'Nuff said, nothing to see here at all.
The engineering reasons to prefer soldered over socketed are aplenty. Sockets have thermal issues, electrical issues (especially with lower VCCIOs and all that sweet high-speed I/O stuff like PCIe Gen 3), contact issues, noise issues... and the issues only get worse as I/O counts increase, which they seem to do regularly.
Honestly, I'm astonished that Intel kept socket solutions around as long as they did.
Surely it'll just turn into the case we have with graphics card manufacturers, where we'll have some company providing CPUs soldered to a simple board with pins on, and enthusiast motherboards with sockets like we have now.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Well, although expected to buy a motherboard and a CPU in one package, it doesn't mean that "enthusiast" market is dead. Instead of buying them separately, they just end up buying one package. Also, if they don't like that one-package offering, they can buy some motherboards for AMD chips.
Don't we have this discussion for pretty much every time Intel changes their chips' form factor? I'd swear we've had this discussion at least 3 or 4 times since the 286 days.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Broadwell will be soldered to the motherboard in order to prevent it from destroying the careers of senior military officers.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
It is because of signal integrity - not some corporate conspiracy theory.
The reason for removal of pins and sockets is that it significantly reduces the ground loop area thus reducing ground bounce. This is why BGA packages were invented where the pins are right at the contact point.
As the frequency (actually edge speeds) increase it is essential to reduce the ground loop area or reduce the path capacitance (much harder) to maintain signal integrity.
By removing the pins and sockets, the design is more reliable - not less.
Reference: High-Speed Digital Design - A handbook of black magic, Howard W Johnson and Martin Graham - Read ALL of the book if you do anything with hardware!!!!!
While this would be somewhat bad news (and I won't immediately flame people for being unhappy about it), I cannot imagine how its consequences are anything close to "time to switch to ARM."
First of all, while it's true that I'm far too wimpy to solder today's thousand-pin CPUs, someone will sell motherboards with CPUs already mounted for you. Asus, Gigabyte, etc already own solder-bots and have proved that they are able to use them. This is just one more chip for them to include on the board. I tend to buy boards and CPUs at the same time anyway.
And now that I think of it, the last "ARM-like" (but not really ARM) motherboard I bought was made by Zotac, and it came with an Atom 330 soldered to the motherboard! *gasp* Intel was already doing what you fear, back in 2009! Oh noooo!
BTW, it took me a while to figure it out, but I think I've got it: TFA author's definition of an "enthusiast" is someone who overclocks. If you don't overclock, then you're not an enthusiast. If you disagree with this definition, then everything he says is going to sound very weird and flamebait to you. He's not so much wrong as just amazingly narrow-minded and specialized.
Dork. I mean that in the nicest way possible. I suppose being narrow-minded about what you're enthusiastic about, demonstrates your enthusiasm for that topic. e.g. "Overclocking is my whole world!! It's not just a thing you do to your machine, it's a way of life!" ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Seems pretty simple to me. You want me to be stuck? No worries - there are lots of other choices. I'll just dump my Intel stock and buy AMD...
That site seems pretty cool in concept but I am a little dubious on their price-gathering methodology. I checked into the Opteron that is top of the list currently, and I can't seem to find it new anywhere. I didn't check any of the other cpu's in the list but I have a feeling some of the ones on top are going to be due to certain retailers having them discounted or only available used.
According to a story by Charlie Demerjian, a long-time hardware journalist
All you needed to know is right there. Anyone who claims Charlie Demerjian is a journalist does not know what they are talking about. He is simply an AMD shill. He's predicted the demise of Intel, nVidia and anyone else not on AMD's payroll time and again for years. What I don't understand is why anyone reads his drivel. I guess in the end it's the same reason people buy the national enquirer.
The reality is that motherboards are more likely to break than CPUs.
I can definitely see why Intel might want to migrate to directly soldered cpus on lower-end machines. As more stuff gets integrated onto the cpu chip we wind up with more and more pins which now must exactly match the mobo connector and other hardware. A socketed chip in this situation is actually less flexible.
But I don't see how this crimps the enthusiast in any way. It's hard to imagine Intel doing this on higher-end Xeon cpus and it should be noted that anyone needing a serious PC these days would likely want to go with a low-cost Xeon anyway. Think about it. Any serious workstation these days is going to have at least 8G of ram and probably 16G. There's virtually no point using non-ECC memory on a 16G rig, not if you want stability, and doubly so if the machine isn't being turned off at night (since low-power / sleep modes work pretty well and newer rams with slow refresh rates can operate in such modes without losing their minds). Cost and margins are less of an issue so Intel doesn't have to continually increase the number of pins in order to integrate more mobo features and connectors on-chip.
My expectation would be that Intel would extend the lower-end of their Xeon line to replace the higher-end of the consumer line, and then go with higher density SOC consumer chips which wind up being soldered into the mobo for the lower-end consumer lines. I think the market place would accept that virtually without protest.
Consider where lower-end boxes are going: System on a Chip is clearly going to be the future. We already have it to some degree with both the memory controller and the graphics driver on-chip. The mobo socket is actually becoming a big expense relative to the other parts on the cpu... probably second only to the cpu itself.
I dare say we might start to see consumer PC's with soldered-in dram soon too. Third biggest expense on a SOC system is going to be dram sockets.
-Matt
BGA packages have sockets just like LGA does and they come in the required pin count. Really the primary difference between an LGA and a BGA is the BGA is an LGA with little balls of solder already on the lands which make it easer to reflow onto a board but is by no means a requirement that it be soldered down. Currently if you want to solder a LGA you have to ball it first. Frankly I think this is a move to unify the chip packaging as they already offer BGA version of some of their CPUs why not make them all BGA and then the OEM builders have more options for mobile systems. The socket takes up a lot of height when you consider companies are fighting over millimeters.
What if Broadwell is JUST for tablets/thin laptops/etc. and they introduce an updated Haswell the year after its original release?
You must be talking about these atoms that were accidently leaked.
They are not that much faster. But Intel claims in the leaked documents they use half the power and double the cores of a the current Atoms. Bare in mind, the newer chipsets are not compatible with Windows 7. I tried submitted that a month ago on this compatibility issue and some moderator put the story down as flamebait ugh.
Intel has no desire to backport the directx11.1 drivers to Windows 7 due to WDDM1.2 which is why IE 10 is not available for Windows 7 as of right now without some hacks.
That might change in the future. If I owned any Intel stock I would be selling it right now or shorting it if I am evil enough. ARM is kicking their ass and Android and IOS shall overtake it by the end of year! By 2016 there will be 4 times as many tablets and phones as PCs and ARM will be the new CPU king. Intel is trying to do whatever it can to survive FAST and perhaps they are making this as small as penny and doing the soldiering so more phone and tablet users pick it.
AMD is more screwed unfortunately. They are about to go bankrupt and are trying to get into the ARM business with qualcomm with radeon graphics in an APU. I think they plan to leave the PC market entirely and focus on low power ARM servers and tablets. The exception maybe their graphics cards for gamers which still sell well.
I have a feeling Apple will probably buy them out in the end as they want control of their own components and could have their own x86 and graphics for their macs and other products. No need to waste money paying other companies.
http://saveie6.com/
The current socketable CPU are LGA (land grid array) vs. only BGA for Broadwell. LGA is designed to go into a socket while BGA is designed to be soldered down. Sockets for BGAs are expensive and unreliable. At work , we get ASICs in BGAs and have to get custom manufactured sockets for testing them. These sockets are big and clunky and not very reliable.
Big difference.
About time, they should solder the ram and ssd on there too while their at it.
If the main part of the market doesn't care, then that is the direction they will go. They are in the business to make money, not cater to a tiny group of people.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So Intel are now so smug they feel they can dictate to the market?
So Fuck Intel.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
If there is two things "Enthusiasts" share in common, its lots of cash, and the desire to have the latest and greatest.
All this decision would mean is having to buy a new motherboard when they want to upgrade their CPU, or vice versa.
Which most of them pretty much do anyway. And even if not, then they will have to spend a bit more of what they already have lots of.
No big deal.
No, not all of us, as some of us dislike Intel. We were pissed when apple switched, and are still avoiding Intel as much as possible.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You misspelled AMD.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
When building my PCs (once every four year or so) I always pick a relatively cheap CPU thinking: "this mobo supports much beafier CPU, later on I'll upgrade the CPU for a really cheap price"...
But then in practice I do never end up upgrading only my CPU: I always go for a new mobo + new CPU instead of messing around and just changing the CPU.
Last one is a Core i5 3450s (lower max TDP) and the mobo supports much more powerful CPU.
This time I'll really upgrade the CPU, promise! (I better should: it may be my last opportunity to do so before CPUs are soldered ;)
So the answer is no.
Err... INTEL have been making PIN-LESS socket for years. Starting for consumer with the LGA-775 socket. Why this is even news??? You can't soldered Intel pinless CPU to motherboard, btw. You need BGA chips if you want to do this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array
Apparently slow day here at /.
Now its pinned chips. With a $30 hot air rework station its easy enough to work/rework bga packages. Re balling jigs with stensils go for the same so removing and reballing the ic is no harder, corner mobile phone repair shops do it all the time.
If by hobbiest you mean a generation of of people who don't want to keep up with progress in the field then yes they have to find a new home.
However some of us find smd and non pinned packages easier to work with, and alot cheaper than the chips with pins (if they are still available). The end result is a more capable circuit in a smaller form factor. Now get back to your lawn grandad.
You pretty much need to buy a new motherboard when you buy a new CPU anyway, The sockets change often enough. Now the two will come as a package. What's the difference? It'll cost less, that's about it. You can probably achieve higher bus/memory/HT/whatever speeds without a socket too.
Sell that INTEL stock now
avoid the lines later
If Intel does do this, then it would be pretty lucrative for someone to step in and create a "socket-board" with the CPU's pre-installed onto the socket boards. Motherboard makers can continue to do what they have been doing... ABIT did almost just this very thing with their BP6 motherboard and paved the way for enthusiasts to build their own SMP machines
some guy builds a sleek little pin board that fits snugly and firmly on each kind of intel chipset
you buy the intel chip, you spend $20 for the guy's container, it snaps in place, away you go
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Lets say this is true for a moment I say this cpu is for some sort of mobile device of some sort, or a very very low cost pc. So yeah it has no pins because it isnt supposed to have them because its not being made for a traditional desktop pc.
If they do make a cpu like this why does the article make it sound like its the only cpu intel will ever make? I mean call me crazy here but couldn intel well I dont know...make multiple types of cpus at once?
They would be crazy to give up their desktop domination. They shame amd at every turn and have no peer, they consistantly make better and better products at reasonable prices. Why would they stop doing that?
Paula Broadwell will be so proud - Broadwell be permanently mounted this time.
you'll buy a board from ASUS/Gigabyte with the CPU already wired in it. Really, this isn't hard. Intel CPUs are already pretty specific to the boards they run on. Buying them is a big pain because you can get a board with the right pin out and find out it's not compatible...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Solder the BGA to a breakout board.
Put the breakout board in a socket
Problem solved.
Alternatively, move on to a different processor to be enthusiastic about
... or become enthusiastic about Beagleboard, Arduino, RaspberryPi or a host of others
... or put your favorite CPU on a ComXpress module
I tend to buy a higher end motherboard and a mid-range CPU. Unless they really go overboard on model options, I highly doubt this will be possible anymore with Intel chips being soldered to the board. For instance, if I wanted better performing or well-featured motherboard, then I would be forced to also purchase the more expensive CPU that is inextricably coupled with it instead of simply buying a less features CPU with just the amount of processing power I need.
The customer loses in this respect.
I'm also not used to swapping motherboard as often as Intel users, since AMD is much more sane in socket changes. I dislike installing motherboards.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Let me get this straight... PC enthusiasts would move from an architecture that has been socketed for years but that might be not be socketed at some point in 2016 or so to move to a architecture that is NEVER offered as a separately sold, socketed part, BECAUSE you like a socketed cpu?
Is that what the poster is suggesting PC enthusiasts would do?
perhaps they are too lazy to design better connectors for cpu and memory ram and pci express and anything that is not soldered by the moment of this "happening"
There's a few CPUs Intel already makes that has this situation. The pins go on the socket side and are spring loaded instead. Dell seems to be a big fan of this design on the Optiplex line, even though RMAing the boards requires stick-on plastic caps that, as often as not, don't stay grippy through shipping...
Furries make the internet go.
Well, Charlie Demerjian is an idiot and known for technically sloppy and inaccurate articles which are attention grabbing by being rhetorically aggressive hatchet jobs.
The fundamental premise that BGAs cannot be socketed is false and an interesting fabrication drawn out of thin air.
Going beyond that (since there are plenty of readily examples of BGA sockets online for anyone online to Google), BGA sockets are generally more expensive relying upon pogo pins or elastomers for the connections. This tends to make them more expensive. This price will likely be paid by some willing to have the flexibility to do sockets at a premium.
I bought a screaming quad system 2007 and had it die in a fireball in 2010, so to upgrade it I needed a motherboard, processor and ram. For the same price as the three year old I doubled my ram and processor capacity and added so much more capability I was boggled. It was $5 cheaper than the three year old. I'm now looking at dumping everything in this PC and getting an something else which if I'm looking at the sales places right will cost less and quadruple my processing power.
ASIG
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
It is possible to remove and replace a BGA but it's not trivial. I'm sure an enterprising hobbyist will figure it out and figure out that there are BGA sockets and figure out how to heat sink them.
It's not the whiners who make money it's the makers.
http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/BGA-Socket-suits-1-00-mm-pitch-devices-484661
Oh darn, someone already done one. ;) Now it needs to grow up.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I'm sure intel is quaking in their boots that 4x as many ARM cpus are selling for $5 each, when they're selling plenty of i5s, i7s and Xeons are upwards of 20x that amount.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm sure intel is quaking in their boots that 4x as many ARM cpus are selling for $5 each, when they're selling plenty of i5s, i7s and Xeons are upwards of 20x that amount.
There are 2 ways of looking at it. That and what a POS profit margin who the fuck cares! Or the Walmart model which in volume you can win low margin sales overall. the fact of the model IBM, Sun, and DEC were beaten by cheap ass x86 linux and wintel units. Intel is part of the old school and will lose in the end at this current pace.
With Office for Android and iOS it neglates a big chunk of office users for needing wintel desktops. Now add other apps and you see the picture. In the mainframe world and Unix server world they first laughed at the PC until Autocad and Oracle started PC ports. Once that happened even the cad user who laughed at the PC eventually left his or her SGI or Sun workstation for a Win NT system. The same will happen with tablets if they can get decent graphics and a keyboard.
Salesforce.com and other cloud providors are providing and many IT departments stuck in IE 6 or 7 do not want to do that again! With a cloud then can choose a surface for the next PC by 2015. Watch! You laugh now but I envision CEOs obessed with cost cutting looking seriously into tablets replacing PCs doing such things for thier now cloud based apps. Where does that leave intell?
http://saveie6.com/
The article is confused about ARM chips, which are practically never socketed. It wouldn't make any sense because ARM CPUs are highly integrated---they tend to include on-chip equivalent of North Bridge, South Bridge and many peripherals such as video hardware, USB, Ethernet, I2C, serial and parallel I/O ports, timers, counters etc. In fact, that's the main problem with Intel in the embedded and enthusiast market: it's hard to make a small/low cost platform like Raspberry Pi because you need an expensive CPU... _and_ the chipset and peripheral chips. The cost difference is staggering---there are ARM microcontrollers that cost less than a dollar (admittedly, not the ones that you can run Linux on, due to lack of virtual memory, and small flash/RAM).
but the connection between the CPU and memory is slower if you have a socket. They are on the last tweak before they have to go to putting the RAM on the CPU,
Now don't all those comments look a little silly?
Oh i agree they need to keep on their toes and make sure they aren't made irrelevant from underneath like Sparc, MIPS, etc.
But, worst case - intel have the best fabs in the world. Absolute worst case... they license arm and punch out better ARM cpus than any one else can produce. Until a competitor gains the upper hand in fabrication technology, intel have little to worry about.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I have found it hard to believe for a long time that the sockets can work at all at these speeds. The only way it's possible is that engineers put a great deal of effort into the socket/package design. Eliminating the socket will reduce costs. It may even be the case that it will be simply impossible to socket the CPU and also reach new increments of increased bus speed.
At this point I'm skeptical that the implications of the article are correct--it remains to be seen what the future of desktop PCs will be. There is still a vast market for PCs used by people who do business and other forms of real work. Laptops, smart phones, etc. just don't cut it.
But I sure wouldn't want to see less choices and higher priced workstations. We'll see...
lol that's a stretch... actually its more "cheapskate consumer" (i get more bang for my buck with AMD), but whatever
Maybe one benchmark is not the rule either. According to other benchmarks, it is quite fast and has one of the best price/speed ratio.
http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/cpu/AMD+FX-8350/review
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core
Because it's so cheap and powerful, this is what I use (with the AMD FX-8320) on pretty much all the desktop computers I sell to companies and individuals and they're really happy to have a 600$ computer built from quality parts.
I don't see it as a threat to enthusiasts/hard core gamers much, At the moment the cpu isn't as critical as having a decent gpu.
When the day comes that there will only be onboards low end/mid range graphics then I may be a little worried.
10 times out of 10 when I build/upgrade my pc I don't use the same cpu or motherboard,Both of those components get updated as to take advantage of other new onboard features, Be it PCI-E 3.0 or USB 3 or faster ram whatever it is it usually requires a new board which in turn may mean buying a new cpu to fit the socket anyways so it's no biggie really.
Don't see why they couldn't offer different versions anyway, low end,mid range and high end with appropriate MB/CPU configurations.
Just one less thing I have to plug in when building a system.
These arm/soc architectures are really getting powerful these days, Next few years they will be overtaking desktop cpu's I would think, I think Samsung has an 8 core Arm chip coming out early next year already, Speed and power efficiency only going to get better in these, Good times ahead
Great. Now find a game that can use it.
Or a desktop OS and app loadout.
And please try to read.
I said I doubt it's going to happen right now. The performance metrics, on a per-core basis, are just too heavily in x86's favor.
That's NOT the same thing as saying it's NEVER going to happen.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How many people actually get a chance to upgrade their CPUs before the socket changes these days anyway? I wouldn't be thrilled be happy about this, and it would kill a lot of flexibility, but at the end of the day it would not be the end of the so called "enthusiast" PC, just the end of the mobo and CPU being discrete components of it. My impression is that this would be less a problem for the high end systems people think of hearing "enthusiast" than it would be for low power and or custom systems that one way or another attach low end CPUs to otherwise high end hardware. So much for cheap new build home servers I guess.
1. Why would the enthusiasts turn to ARM? AMD is still around and has way higher speeds. Besides: Aren't most speed enthusiasts gamers, trying to get insane framerates? Most games still don't run on Linux (last time I checked was a while back though) or Metro (but that's still in it's diapers). Yes there are android games, and many of them, but the graphics are not in league with the big guys. Besides: Are there pinned ARM chips? I thought those were all solder chips.
2. This chip is designed for a pinless package. So what? That doesn't mean they will not bring a next chip with pins.
This reeks of FUD.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Price scraping is always a bit iffy and with rarer items even more so, so I think I'd discount the Opteron. A few steps below the top the prices look realistic and have matched what was available locally in retail for me.
BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ARM MOTHERBOARD CONSUMER MARKET!
Jezus fucking christ, what has happened to slashdot?
First off, if Intel is REALLY going to snub the custom PC market and give every motherboard maker a fucking heart attack, the logical alternative is AMD who already does very well in this segment as a real enthusiast PC nowadays is about raid and SSD and video cards. CPU power is only needed for over-clocking pissing contests.
And Linux has nothing to do with enthusiasts building their own PC's. If anything, Linux is the low-end of the market simply because Linux requires fewer resources, who is going to put a black edition CPU in a Linux box? My own Linux machines are all low power machines as they are there for stability and always on, not for high powered instant computing (gaming).
Yes, I could see them going from x86 to ARM but my custom PC is AMD machine because it is for gaming. The atom linux machines? (Actually one is Atom and one is the AMD equivelant) ALREADY come with the CPU soldered onto the mother board.
If this story is true then AMD shares are about to sky-rocket. The enthusiast market isn't just nerds building their own PC from scrap, it the thousands of small system builders who make their profit by offering a basic machine with a LOW LOW PRICE in advertising and then upselling their customers on a faster CPU in the shop. Now they need to sell them a an entire motherboard. And stock it to. A motherboard for every CPU speed... hello inventory nightmare.
And forget upgrading a server by slotting in just a new CPU. Are they also going to do this with their server chips? No hot swappable CPU's but hot swappable motherboards? Rebuy an entire motherboard with 8 CPU's because one failed?
I think either Intel decided that poor AMD needed a huge boost, has gone completely insane or the story is missing an important detail: for instance, is this a full product replacement or a product sideline. WILL IT REPLACE traditional CPU's or is it just a sidestep like the atom chips are?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
About 8 years ago, I bought a motherboard. It had an AMD chip on it. Literally *on* it. You couldn't remove it, it wasn't even socketed. This isn't anything new. I want to say the board was MSI but I can't be sure enough to remember without looking.
Had that motherboard for all that time without a problem (still have it somewhere) and I can't even remember the last time I changed a component inside a machine (used to be fitting PCI cards all day long, adding RAM, etc.). Given that I've managed thousands of machines over the last ten years, that's a pretty significant sign that computers - generally speaking, for business use - get replaced before they ever get upgraded.
Hell, I actually used my last piece of Arctic Silver to give to my dad friend's for use on fitting heatsinks to his professional remote-control model racing car. That was a few years ago now. I'm not even sure I'd know the right sockets any more without having to research it. In the past, I was always adding ram, sticking in cards for the "new" USB, Ethernet etc. standards, and occasionally (very occasionally) having to re-seat a heatsink. Replacing a CPU? I can't even remember the last time I ever did it, but probably back in the 386 days.
The fact is, as has been the case since the early Pentium days, if you're upgrading your CPU it's because you either bought a very cheap setup initially, or for replacement (which suggests substandard components anyway, I can't tell you that I've ever replaced a faulty CPU), or to get every ounce out of an old machine in a very uneconomical way (much cheaper nowadays to just buy a replacement that will almost certainly be faster).
For the majority of home users, and the vast majority of small / office businesses, there's just no need to ever upgrade the CPU. And if you do, it normally means upgrading the motherboard and probably other components as well, which takes you into the cost of a new setup anyway. Motherboards with CPU's hard-wired is really NOT that big a deal for the vast, vast majority of people. Hell, for all intents and purposes, most laptops are already "non-upgradeable" anyway (and, yes, I once owned a laptop that had a soldered-in CPU too).
When it comes to it, CPU's being socketed still is something that I find incredibly surprising. There were times when BIOS chips were socketed too, but most people scrapped that idea. There were times when FPU's were separately socketed, but that went the way of the dodo. Networking used to require an expansion card. So did USB, sound, and a myriad other features that we take for granted. Hell, even GPU's are coming onto the board now, but there I at least see a reason to allow upgrades because the onboards aren't that powerful and the expansion card ones still don't hit bottlenecks on the standard motherboards (but, to be honest, the same was try of everything from soundcards to winmodems at one point).
Outside of large servers with SMP motherboards (which, after a year or two, the cost of adding more processors usually outweighs the cost of the server anyway), I don't even care about CPU sockets.
This is one of those things, inevitably, that will go into an integrated package. And, overall, nobody will notice. And the gamers (I hate the word "enthusiasts" for things like this, the same as I do for trainspotters, etc.) will still be upgrading to new motherboards at the same time anyway (because how else will get you the full power of your new CPU?).
Talking about upgrading CPU's just reminds me of the days of things like the 486 DX4, where you could ramp up an old 386 motherboard to a 100MHz CPU - still, without upgrading the motherboard little of serious use benefited very much. And it was probably cheaper to just buy a new board and CPU simultaneously.
Worried about this? It was happening years ago. I can probably dig out a board that was available on general sale to prove it (even at the time, I bought it because I thought "I'll never be upgrading the CPU without the motherboard any
How often do people upgrade the CPU without swapping the motherboard out?
By the time I'm looking at a CPU upgrade, the motherboard's redundant.
Actually, this whole "integrated cpu" would be a very good deal had they went another step - integrate good heat dissipation solution. I.e. connect several heatpipes to the die of cpu, then a few more to other components, put nice thick metal bar on the side of the board and terminate all those headpipes on that bar. This way we could easily connect the whole thing to something big and metal and avoid having all those heavy cpu heatsinks. And broken cpu sockets, too.
Thank the lord this is finally happening!
Say hello to:
Cheaper processors - Easier to manufacture, less expensive pin materials and coatings!
Cheaper motherboards - No pricey sockets!
Higher memory rates - BGA has far superior parasitic characteristics/impedance control to those nasty pins!
Better heat profile - BGA works hard to remove heat from the chip into the motherboard!
There will still be the enthusiast market, which will have better power modules, better decoupling etc etc etc.
Really, how often do you just change your processor and expect a noticable return?
You're a poor schmuck's why. Can't prove your b.s. here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3272015&cid=42083563 and we know you can't since you were asked to and you had a shit fit over it, here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3272015&cid=42097505 so you can stop your lies crutch.
For most 'Enthusiasts' were are approaching the point where an Intel CPU is effectively an old-style Northbridge. With the GPGPU handling most of the actual workload.
Weren't most Northbirdges soldered?
Yes, Lot of CPU's come from the same line, except that some cores/features are disabled by the test procedure. You can just unlock them with a special code
The biggest shortfall on CPU design was the interface between the chip and the board. Pins generate noise, and noise reduces speed. By removing the pins, the motherboard interface can be made faster and thus the chips can become faster.
It's only a matter of time before RAM chips follow suit (some laptops do this already). RAM is certainly becoming cheap enough that it's easy to fit down a long lasting 16GB of "non upgradable" memory.
If true Intel will virtually disappear on the gamer platform. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/
#1: What is AMD doing? Not going to soldered-only? Oh. AMD still exists.
#2: I buy a new CPU every couple years. Since I want to actually get value for my money (play games faster), I get a new motherboard and RAM to go with it. Therefore, it may as well have been soldered in in the first place. I'm not blowing money on a new CPU so that I can hobble it by using a two-year-old motherboard and RAM.
Also, who gives a shit about ARM? Enthusiasts who build gaming rigs are not going to be able to fire up Steam and play their library of games they paid hundreds to thousands of dollars for because no one except cell phone manufacturers gives a shit about ARM either. People who want a cheap/low power platform already have AMD and Arm to look to anyway and won't care that Intel is doing something that only marginally effects any decision they have to make, if at all.
Motherboards are seriously cheap. I have never upgraded a motherboard without replacing the CPU, though I have replaced a few bad motherboards.
Hopefully market demand will render Intel's attempt at controlling the motherboard market to fail.
If Intel doesn't change their plans, the future pasture for enthusiasts looks like it will go to ARM chips or something from offshore manufacturers."
Um, there is another brand out there called "AMD".
Also, since when does Intel manufacture onshore??
What was this original author smoking? Really.
There are countless "reviews" of processors and motherboards on NewEgg and elsewhere, which it is obvious the person damaged their system due to carelessness when building a new system. Soldering the CPU onto the motherboards will undoubtedly greatly reduce the warranty replacement costs that Intel loses money on each year. I was just thinking a few months ago that there is a real opportunity for motherboard vendors to improve upon the current ATX/BTX specs if they soldered processors and even memory onto the board to sell near-foolproff pre-assembeled components with new mounting methods to eliminate the current standoff+screws that are used. I would personally welcome this change.
In the nearly 20 years that i've been building systems, i've only ever upgraded the CPU itself on 2 systems out of 7, the other 5 were either built from scratch or upgraded with a new motherboard to go with the new CPU.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I hope they go through with this at a time when AMD is poised to produce higher end CPU's thereby effectively stealing Intel's consumer share.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
If this is the case (which I really doubt), then AMD will finally make a comeback. Even if it is the case, Intel changes its stupid socket like every 6 months now, making upgrading impossible anyway. So for all intents and purposes the CPU could come sodered to the MB and would really be of little import. In fact many buy they CPU/MB in combos anyway. I assume the Intel isn't about to cut out 3rd party makers (they would be hit with antitrust if they did), in which case it is all moot anyway, as you would still have all the selection of enthusist boards. If anything Intel has been very GOOD to enthusists in making the "K" series of CPU with multipliers unlocked, which is a new thing, that hasn't been available for some time. Provided the CPU that comes sodered to the MB is not dumbed down... but that likely depends on the MB it is attached to. I would hate to see only "K" series or whatever being sodered to only the most expensive MB available, while the budget MB get similar CPU... In any event, I really doubt this. Maybe for OEM's or limited runs... I have seen this already, I don't see why the buisness need for it now. Anyway the devil is in the details, and how they implement this, could go a number of different ways. If they make it a pile of suck, and AMD doesn't do it, then of course everyone will just move to AMD. If they do it smart, it will probably have very little impact whatsoever.
If there's a problem with my CPU, or I want to upgrade, I have to buy a new motherboard.
I think I'll just look into AMD ( that's right Intel, not such a bright move ).
Obviously motherboard makers would just start selling their wares with the most popular 'enthusiast' chips per-soldered.
I reckon this is great news - how many system failures have been due to a misaligned or slightly corroded pin? How about the board manufacturer fitting the cooler too? What do you think this stops me doing exactly? I can still use my choice of graphics card, insert my own choice of ram, select my own power supply and hard drives, case....
and what everyone has said about processor upgrades is true - unless the processor fails in the first year, it's history - cheaper, and money better spent to upgrade the mobo and processor together.
I have several development boards at home that I can replace BGA parts on. They use a low profile plastic corner "locator" to put the part in the right spot. I just did this yesterday, putting an older PCH in place of a newer one.
I envision AMD stock going up.
Back in the 486/Pentium/Pentium II/Pentium III days I upgraded my CPU multiple times...
I think I had different 486's in the same motherboard ( DX2-66, DX4-100, 5x86-133 ) at one point.
Similarly with my beloved Asus motherboard Where I went from single slot1 CPU P2-350 to dual P2-450's to dual PIII-1GHz. That was a killer.
Now days, I don't buy new CPU's.... I guess I just buy new video cards. The tech isn't moving fast enough anymore.
Intel saves AMD
Does anyone think that Enthusiasts won't just jump over to AMD instead?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
ala ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Intel_Celeron_300A_MHz.jpg
The thing about CPU socket that no one mentioned is simple. Not for upgrades, but for the initial configuration. I want to pair motherboard x with CPU y. The motherboard vendor x does not have to stock 25 different CPU skus pre-soldered to the boards. They just sell a board with a socket and let the end user select a CPU. This would suck because mfgs are not going to stock every CPU sku... it's just not feasible (especially on the tight margins). So, your choices will be flagship, middle of the road, and weak-sause. If you want something in between those choices... they won't be there. I can't see Intel wanting this by the way because of the way binning CPUs is done. CPUs that will clock higher are sold at a premium and ones that don't meet the spec at a discount. If you don't have a market for the in-betweens that's product they don't move.
Please find a new meme. That is all.
WALSTIB!
Soldering chips straight onto the motherboard is much more economical.
You can also reduce the electriciy bill, expenses with air conditioning and costs due to technological evolution using inexpensive low power processors.
Imagine if you could buy a motherboard and just upgrade processor/memory when you find convenient, nothing else, for the next 10 years.
But... if chips will be soldered... how you can replace them?
Answer, in a nutshell: carrier boards and module boards. See this: http://www.qseven-standard.org/
There are carrier boards in popular form factors, like ATX, uATX and mini-ITX. ... all in a single small board.
There are modules boards with processor, memory, LAN controler, PCIe controller
Just plug the module onto the carrier board. You can run Linux, Android and even Windoze on it.
You can build your next set-top box with an inexpensive quad core ARM processor, for example, for under USD$100.
You can build your next powerful workstation, using modules powered by an AMD APU, for example, or an Intel i7.
You can also build a super computer, with hundreds of low power CPU+GPU boards, from a fraction of the price it was a couple of years ago.
Humble end users and rich big corporation are alike: they all appreciate the idea of saving money.
Soon part of these innovations will be available to end users too.
This is not the first time this has happened. I'd expect systems to become increasingly modular.
A little PC board with a soldered-on Intel chip, which itself has pins ...
Intel hasn't had pins on their CPUs for at least three generations now - all the LGA sockets are for CPUs with flat pads - the pins are in the socket, not the CPU.
Sounds like a journalist hasn't done his homework :)
Quite a snit this article. But it's also clear the author is a tech wannabe who knows absolutely nothing about 1) the current state of the art issues with deep nanometer ICs and 2) nothing about performance requirements of current PCs intersected with that state of the art (especially the limitations).
Mindless drivel about "overclockers" being "locked out" is the proof the guy is a moron. You can't overclock anymore because you stress current parts without dropping the usable life down to days or weeks of operation. Much the same reasons for why battery packs are going away and being soldered in to laptops also applies to processors: we are reaching the limits of what you can reliably achieve without soldering directly to the board. It's like bitching about SMD parts "not being replaceable". Just words of an out of touch moron!
By now, enthusiasts should have learned how to hold a soldering iron, or a hot air station...
you guys are utter morons -Intel cuts you off from a CPU why wouldnt you buy a cpu from the OTHER major pc cpu manu?
here is a hint they bout out ATI not long ago
This is really the slow and inevitable death of desktop computing in general; not just the death of enthusiast PCs. More and more people are using tablets, laptops, phones. Before we know it, the largest market for Intel will be small-form computers. Think 5-7 years down the road. Imagine how much processing power laptops will have? Or for that matter, imagine how much power a small computer (think smaller than HTPC) will have? Intel is only preparing for the future, and it's good they are starting now. The industry is changing; it wasn't always going to be like this.
This will be costly for the people that buy OEM licenses of Windows OS. The way that I understand it is that the OEM license is tied to the motherboard serial number. With OEM license you can upgrade everything (video card, audio card, network, hard drive, RAM, etc) except the motherboard and you will not need to purchase another license. However, if you replace the motherboard you will need to purchase another license. Supposedly Microsoft will not reactivate an OEM license. They will make you buy another license.
This should not affect the retail license versions.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
To quite a dramatic conclusion.
A small company could solder these new CPU's to a daughterboard to allow it to be socketed!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
BGA's and various other methods, are not pins
Who cares? The only "enthusiasts" out there are whiny PC gamers.
is that I need to replace the mobo if the CPU goes bad.
Last time I wanted to upgrade the CPU without needing to upgrade the mobo? When I had a freaking slot to put the cpu in?
And upgrading the mobo is hardly ever worth it unless the cpu is getting upgraded as well.
you are an idiot. Intel is not doing away with the LGA packaging on the desktop. some other idiot started this rumor and all you of you jerks fell for it and keep writing about it. Nobody is going to go from X86 to ARM, if you serious think that let me know how you plan on running any game on ARM. start validating things you write about and only write on facts you actually know about...
Good motherboards aren't. I've upgraded my computer many times recently by adding a CPU with more GHz's and cores, for very little, just picking the right auctions online, or being around the right friends.
Also, you hit the nail on the head with Intel. Their CPUs really do last a long time. One can be passed on many boards before it dies or is too slow to be worthwhile. So what do they do? Tie the CPU to the 3rd weakest component in the computer (HDD and power supply are 1 and 2). CPU's just don't fail often.
I just wonder if someone will point some anti-trust fingers at them again.
My last cpu from intel did not have pins?????
I'm more worried about keeping us from running whatever software we want. Aren't they coupling bios / windows together?
This is more a case of performance I expect, the higher I/O speeds of the newer memory and graphics ports and PCI-e are such that the costs to maintain signal integrity through a socket adaptor are horrid. If your really performance minded, you'd shotgun the socket and solder existing PC's to the motherboard today, over clockers would likely benefit from the lower noise due to removing the inductance of the socket leads on the power and ground pins. This would yield higher reliability at higher clock frequencies. The concerns over socket signal integrity have been an issue testing these high end CPU's since the I/O bandwidths approached 100Mhz.
I agree with Jump! Jump! Jump! To quite a dramatic conclusion.
Also... in the IC testing community, regardless of the physical structure (flip chip/BGA/PGA), we still refer to the electrical contacts of a device under test aka (DUT) as "pins". So these devices are likely to have "pins" forever, even when we start interfacing to these chips with photons...
Ross Youngblood
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you still put AMD CPU's in a custom PC? I did, just earlier this year. Forget Intel. You generally get more bang for the buck with an AMD-based platform.