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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."
Not only that but CPU sockets usually only work for one CPU family and aren't interchangeable. You can't but AMD's chip into Intels motherboards.
So at best you can normally replace to an equaviant CPU maybe a couple of clock cycles faster but that's it.
If your upgrading you have to replace both
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Why can't you go to ARM?
Lots of linux distros have ARM support.
Erm, am I missing something? I've seen plenty of CPUs that just had pads on them. The socket had the pins - the clasp pushed the CPU down onto them.
No pins, and still user-replacable.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Uh, yes. Want to overclock? Those chipsets cost more. Serial port? Do you want to spend extra to get the optical audio output, or is 2-channel analog OK? What about PCI slots, need any? How many 8 or 16x PCI-E slots do you want? Cause it costs more if you want 2 or more. Do you think you'll need 4 RAM slots or is 2 enough? Do you want to spend the extra dough to have 4 6 Gbps SATA ports or is 2 enough? Or do you want to save some more money and just have 3 Gbps ports? Do you want 8 USB 3.0 ports, or just 2? Or maybe none? All different cost structures. eSATA? RAID 5 built into the motherboard?
Yes, there's worth in shopping for a motherboard if you're an enthusiast. You're not. That's OK, but don't brush off everyone else just because we want things you don't care about.
An "x86 app" is an app that someone has compiled for x86 and only given you the binary.
Open-source apps are not generally architecture specific. If you have source code and development tools, you can build it on whatever you like, and ARM is pretty mature in this regard. Several Linux distros have ARM ports already, including Debian and Arch, and probably Fedora, and there's a FreeBSD ARM project, also, if you're allergic to the GPL.
And there is Android, for which the OS is natively ARM, even if the app-land is Java.
This ability to mix and match software and hardware in ways not anticipated by the creators of the software or the hardware is exactly why open source is awesome.
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