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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."
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?
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/
I've bult my own PCs for 20+ years, and I can't remeber ever really caring about moving the CPU from one motherboard to another. I shop for them as a matched pair, and assuming they work when I get them, I've alays replace both if problems developed later down the road (because a few years later, when you're on the far side of the failure "bathtub curve", you might as well replace both).
I don't see having to buy the CPU soldered to the motherboard as an impediment really - as long as I can swap out the heatsink and other components.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not to mention that ARM chips use a different instruction set, so .... you can't go from x86 to ARM. If you're going anywhere you're going to go AMD.
Whoever wrote the summary needs a quick dose of clue-by-four.
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.
My AMD systems from 2007 are Athlon64 and can still be upgraded to the latest PhenomII black editions fine after a bios update. So I do not know what you are talking about.
Both of you must be those Intel users I keep hearing about where different sockets and chipsets are made on purpose to limit compatiblity so you have to upgrade everything. Oh and boy Windows activation wont like that either. Better buy another copy of Windows for that board as well.
http://saveie6.com/
This is what everybody seems to be missing. You're giving up options when you start bundling and don't allow mix/match.
Suppose I'm building a cluster, and I just need REALLY fast CPUs with good memory/LAN benchmarks, and I could care less whether it even has a PCIe slot in it at all. However, all the fast CPUs get bundled with expensive motherboard with 14 slots, 6 SATA ports, and so on. Or, suppose I'm building a data acquisition box that needs 6 PCI slots but not much CPU - again I'm stuck buying the i7 or whatever since that got classed as a high-end board.
That is what frustrates me about things like cell phones - I can't pick the CPU/RAM/flash combo I want, but only what some marketer decided I should have. So, getting the extra 1GB of RAM isn't an option - at most you might get some choice with flash.
Not to mention that ARM chips use a different instruction set, so .... you can't go from x86 to ARM. If you're going anywhere you're going to go AMD.
Whoever wrote the summary needs a quick dose of clue-by-four.
Yes, because tinkerers and enthusiasts are famous for their staunch reliance on a single architecture. I can picture them now, refusing to abandon Intel due to their reliance on Office 2007 and the native drivers for their Canon Pixma Pro.
It used to be that every other story on Slashdot was about how Linux would/could run on anything. And then I see comments like this and wonder how many of slashdot's users even remember back that far... Or were even alive then?
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.
I agree, I've built PCs for ages and never upgraded a CPU, despite planning to.
The thing I can see this effecting, though, is diversity of price.
Right now you can spend $75-$350 on a motherboard, and $75-1000 on a processor. There are X motherboards, and Y compatible processors, for X * Y price/feature/etc points.
When USB3 came out is when I upgraded, so I got a low-to-mid spec motherboard (only cared about USB3, don't need dual video card capability etc) and then a mid-high spec processor (fastest i5 that wasn't the enthousiast factory unlocked ones).
With this change I won't have that choice. It'll be buy one of two models of this motherboard with processor A and B. OEMs won't make hundreds of combinations, and vendor's wouldn't stock them if they did.
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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The real problem is not the upgrading.
The real problem will be getting what you want in the first place.
Life is good now. I can get exactly what I want. I do not have t over buy my CPU because I want RAID and dual gigabit NICs.
I can get a decent CPU and put money into a board that will give me good OC capabilities.
Once this becomes the norm you know and I know the number of choices is going to go WAY down.
You will have the Super Expensive, Top CPU and what MB they thick is best, a kinda nice duo, a normal can do almost everything in a not annoying way and a low power cost saving set.
Fuck that noise.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
Everyone (including you) is missing the entire point. The purpose of installing your own CPU isn't for the ability to upgrade later. It's to find the market sweet spot among current CPUs sold at the time. Then, as a secondary consideration do you choose the MB with the features you want. When you purchase a fixed soldered combo, you can no longer make that market decision. I take serious issue with that!
Life is not for the lazy.
...there is nothing stopping the motherboard makers from soldering their own socket to the board, then soldering the chip to a carrier PCB that plugs into the new socket.
Or a smart one.
Think about it for a few moments. AMD's in serious trouble. Without help, they run the real risk of going bankrupt. And without AMD, Intel's the "last one left" (other than minor bit players like Via and NatSemi). Which means the EU and US government will be seriously looking at Intel for possible anti-trust. And they've been found guilty before. Last thing Intel would want is to be forced to make several decisions to avoid issues like opening up the spec of their processors and such to compeitors, and forced licensing of patents to everyone and everyone (they aren't FRAND yet).
Plus having to ensure that every move they make won't be found to be anti-trust (think the compiler fiasco - they may be forced to ensure that everyone who makes a compatible chip gets the optimizations). As well, any business decisions they make will get scrutinized - if they want to acquire a company for some technology, for example.
By forcing the enthusiasts (who make up a tiny percent of the market) to AMD, it gives AMD the much needed injection they need, without giving up much of the market (Intel's sales to Dell, HP, Apple, etc. are far greater).
Desktop PCs aren't dying, but they're not exactly being replaced in huge quantities - even laptop sales are affected by smartphones and tablets. Businesses will buy desktop PCs (though they're increasingly buying laptops), but they're never upgraded so Intel is fine with that. The other buyer of desktops would be enthusiasts, who are likely to pay more and buy top tier stuff. And even then AMD isn't getting a lot - the high end AMD processors are always in short supply.
And hell, by giving AMD the entusiast market, they can point to all the negative Intel sentiment saying "these people have vowed not to buy Intel and they're buying our competitor's products, so we're not a monopoly".
Of course, the practical reason is sockets suck - impedance matching problems, bad connections (your PC depends on the working of nearly 1200 pieces of metal pressing against 1200 other pieces of metal. If one of those is slightly oxidized or doesn't exert enough pressure, your PC can crash), and plenty more other things. Solder joints are far more reliable.