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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."
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?
The ARM CPUs are aimed at more of the low power consumption model that the old VIA CPUs targeted with the mini-ITX form factor. Which you may recall, used CPUs soldered to the motherboard. Its a different market space, where the motherboard and CPU have been combined for many years now without any world shattering consequences.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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...
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no"
I hate sigs.
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/
The only problem is that when I buy a motherboard / CPU, there are usually a dozen or so variations on which CPU will work in a given motherboard. Right now it makes sense to mix & match to get exactly what you want, but if the CPU is attached to the motherboard at purchase time, you are stuck with one of the 2 - 3 choices that the motherboard manufacturer decides to sell.
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.
For the record, all current Intel desktop CPUs are pinless. The pins are on the board. So saying it ships without pins doesn't really say much. That's why I have a sneaking suspicion that the author might just be a clueless dumbass talking out their ass.
Oh boy, I hadn't thought of that. I can just see a situation where you need to buy an i7 to get any motherboard with decent overclocking ability or other features when you would be far happier with an i5 and an extra $100 in your pocket. Intel and motherboard manufacturers working together like this could mean terrible things for home builder.
Always. I have never owned a PC in which I have not upgraded the CPU at least once.
Post-PC AT era, about the same here for my main machines. Side / secondary machines are not upgraded, treated as appliance. I'm guessing we do about the same upgrade protocol... and the average /.er is getting VERY confused how this works.
Example. Go back about a decade. My old P-2 or P-75 or whatever was feeling slow and AMD's mainline socket at the time was the 939. Not new, but not obsolete either. ... I don't remember but it was the strategy above, a decent mobo with the cheapest compatible CPU, years later to be upgraded to the fastest CPU in that socket ever made...
That year I buy a decent 939 mobo and the cheapest slowest POS 939 CPU that is available.
A couple years later, they release the 940 socket probably purely to segment the market or whatever. Anyway, 939 CPUs get CHEAP and I buy the fastest one ever made for like $100, which actually performs pretty well compared to a cheap 940.
A couple years later the Worlds Fastest 939 CPU was getting a tad slow, so
Yes, I have run into exciting problems like the mobo BIOS needs to be upgraded to the newest version to even recognize the "worlds fastest X" cpu which didn't even exist as a cpu revision number when the mobo was made. Been there, had to reinstall the old cpu, upgrade the bios, and re-re-install the new cpu.
No, you can't really afford to do this with cutting edge CPUs and always buy the most expensive one available every 3 months or whatever, that would be quite an expensive hobby, or at least a waste of time WRT optimization of fun per $. But if you pay attention to the market, you can maintain a spot above average for practically no money.
1) Never upgrade unless its slow. The CPU I mean, not the graphics card or whatever else.
2) Never buy a mobo with anything but the cheapest possible CPU
3) When that socket expires, wait until the fastest CPU for that socket ever made is about $99 then upgrade
4) Repeat for about 20 years (so far). I've been doing something like this since the 386 era.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I've certainly done so a lot of times. Stick a newer more powerful CPU into a desktop or media PC and I get a chain upgrade of 2-4 other machines. 5 faster machines for the price of 1, hard to get a better deal.
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?
You made an excellent point. It made me realize that economically tying the motherboard and the CPU will necessitate less choice.
Right now if there are X motherboards and Y CPUs compatible with those motherboards, a seller needs to stock X + Y items to provide buyers all possible combinations. In the new system if the same degree of flexibility is to be offered a seller would have to stock X * Y items.
There is no way that will happen. We will get less choice if this change becomes a reality unless as others point out someone offers CPU's soldered to something that's socketable that would then be put into a motherboard with a socket (assuming that this is possible and there aren't signal integrity reasons that are forcing Intel to solder the chip to the motherboard).
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.
What you are calling an "enthusiast" is what I would call "grandma".
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
...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.
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...
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.
I have a question for the Slashdot audience. In fact it would make a great poll:
I have upgraded a CPU and kept my mother board:
10% or less of the time.
11-25% of the time.
26-50% of the time.
51%-75% of the time
76-100% of the time
For me it would be 10% of the time. Usually when I upgrade CPUs motherboards have improved so much as well that it makes sense to pick up a brand new one even if the socket is the same.