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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
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).
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.
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)
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no"
I hate sigs.
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
Bah. Real enthusiasts use discrete transistors.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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!
I don't think that this is the kind of soldering job that an enthusiast could do, unless you happen to be up for reflow soldering.
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!!!
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.
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
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.
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. :/
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).
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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