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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."
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
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?
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'
A plan when AMD goes out of business which should happen anyday now if rumors are true sadly.
Why should Intel care then? They have no competition anymore and can do whatever they want.
http://saveie6.com/
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?
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)
The article mentions that the CPUs will be sold attached to motherboards. Enthusiasts will be able to build PCs just fine, just not separate motherboard/CPU.
No sig today...
Yes, but what if the motherboard you want only comes sold with a CPU you don't want, or vice-versa? This bundling will in practice reduce choice, as I doubt every combination will be offered.
So I have features on my $599 special that only your xeon or Icore7 extreme has like hardware virtualization. This is a phenomII and the 10% - 15% performance deduction was well worth the price for my 6 core. It still has a ton of mips and can handle everything I throw at it.
http://saveie6.com/
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!
This is a false dilemma, as an "enthusiast" would just choose from what's available. After all, you can't really get every motherboard/CPU combination now, you can only use the CPUs that are supported by your chosen motherboard.
Have you read my blog lately?
My shop builds dozens of computers per year custom for our customers and I need specific motherboard-cpu combos.
And my shop gets in PCs by the hundreds every year that aren't going to suffer at all from this. Most other people here work in the same kind of shop as I do. Don't overestimate the importance of your "dozens" of computers per year thing. And hell, I haven't seen a homemade PC in years. No one is really going to care.
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.
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.
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HEADLINE: "Can any headline which ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?"
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The reason why you haven't "seen a homemade PC in years" is because most people who build them are knowledgeable enough, and thanks to internet have enough advice on maintenance and fixing to never have to bring their PC to you.
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
Wanting a few more options than a "vanilla" discount motherboard is hardly 'hyperoptimization'
From my varied experience of assembling machines, the motherboard has always been the most important choice around which everything else is based.
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