Intel Leaving Desktop Motherboard Business

An anonymous reader writes "As soon as its next-gen Haswell CPUs ship, Intel will start to leave the desktop motherboard business. It will be a lengthy process, taking at least three years, and the company will continue to produce chipsets. The company will be focusing instead on smaller and newer form factors. For one, it will be working on its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) boards, which are 4" by 4". Legacy support for old motherboards and the new Haswell motherboards will continue through their respective warranty periods. 'Given the competitive landscape, it's not a big surprise that Intel is refocusing its efforts on areas that have greater potential impact on future growth. All segments of the PC business are under extreme pressure, with sales slipping and users gravitating toward tablets and smart phones. Focusing on reference designs for all-in-one PCs, Ultrabooks and tablets will enable Intel's partners to more rapidly ship products that appeal to the new generation of mobile users.' AnandTech points out that one of the reasons Intel put out motherboards for so long was to assure a baseline level of quality for its CPUs. Now that the boards coming out of Taiwan are of good quality, Intel doesn't need to expend the effort."

Comments

Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are (were) overpriced. I can't imagine anyone will miss them.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are much, MUCH better engineered. You get what you pay for.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are (were) overpriced. I can't imagine anyone will miss them.

High end Intel motherboards were relabled server boards. Costly, not flashy but stable.
I've still got a couple of Bad Axe's 2 that are still running without a hicup almost 24/24 since 2006.
Wish all Asus/Msi/Gigabyte motherboards were like Intel motherboards.

Re:Overpriced

[trum4n]

I have to disagree. Years of using MSI and ASUS has shown great reliability and performance. Every Intel board i have had were total junk. Short lived, cheaply built. Of course, it might have been the processors terrible form factors. Every MSI and ASUS i ever had was AMD powered, and far superior to that LGA crap simply because it had pins and wasn't completely disabled by a little vibration. With my years of experience in the field, i just have to say, i will never buy anything with the Intel badge again.

Re:Overpriced

[slaker]

In my experience, Intel's boards seem to be considerably more reliable. I'm sure my sample size is small, perhaps 100 systems per year, but I have had a much, much lower incidence of problems with Intel motherboards than with Asus or Gigabyte, and MSI doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with those two.

Intel boards are actually made by Foxconn, so it's possible that this will be a change in name only, but I do also value the fact that I can get an RMA on a motherboard from Intel within two business days. Neither Gigabyte nor Asus offer anything like that level of service and paying a little extra for it is entirely justifiable.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a smallish IT company and we build a lot of workstations.
I can vouch for this. ASUS is ok, MSI is complete junk and Intel is pretty solid.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I've also found Intel boards to be very picky about settings, components, and drivers.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Same. There was something about the lack of spelling mistakes in the manuals and BIOS that did it for me.

Re:Overpriced

[trum4n]

Agreed. I've had a brand new system that i just built not boot due to incompatible RAM. It meets all the specs, exceeds some of them, but no good in an Intel board. Drop it in an MSI, works great for years. G.Skill told me it's because they wouldn't pay to be "I7 Certified".

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for.

So, I guess Aleive brand Naproxin Sodium is three times as effective as generic naproxin Sodium? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. "You get what you pay for" is a salesman's favorite lie.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

reliability for a basement dweller spending all day on WoW or rebuilding his PC and for something that produces revenue are two different things

i've used MSI, Abit and Asus since the 1990's and they were OK for home use. not for work use

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you there, not that I am a fan of intel but asus and msi certainly have quality control issues that need sorted out, foxconn seems to be pretty good at keeping their boards under control and they seem to actually support their products with bios updates for at least a couple months to fix bugs.

Re:Overpriced

[trum4n]

If money was involved, i sure wouldn't trust Intel with it. Infact, as a non-basement-dwelling engineer who just shipped a truck load of Dual 12core Opteron servers, I'll take anything over Intel.

Re:Overpriced

[sl4shd0rk]

I've never seen and Intel board with an AMD socket, so assuming you run Intel exclusively.

paying a little extra for it is entirely justifiable.

That depends on your budget. Besides, no matter what you buy, in a few years the board is obsolete. The newest RAM, CPU (and sometimes even video cards/Power supply) will not work with your board and you upgrade or make do. After a few years, you can't get $20 for it on Ebay anyway. It's basically a frisbee if it hurls.

Re:Overpriced

[TheNinjaroach]

I tend to think that the high end ASUS boards are the best money can buy. I've always thought Intel motherboards only compete in the OEM sector.

Re:Overpriced

[citizenr]

Intel mobo = no OC

Re:Overpriced

[oh_my_080980980]

Because you used them for work.....I have they worked fine.

Re:Overpriced

[oh_my_080980980]

I can vouch for ASUS working fine but keep believing Intel has some magical properties.....

Re:Overpriced

[arkenian]

You get what you pay for. So, I guess Aleive brand Naproxin Sodium is three times as effective as generic naproxin Sodium? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. "You get what you pay for" is a salesman's favorite lie.

I disagree. Aleve brand Naproxin Sodium is not, of course, three times as effective as generic. It is, however, far more Aleve. You get what you pay for is, generally, true. But you need to be aware of what, exactly, you're paying for, and ask if YOU value it. Generally, the salesman lies about what, precisely, it is that you're paying for.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, and last i read Opterons suck compared to Xeons

Re:Overpriced

[oh_my_080980980]

You got a replacement board in 2 days or the process to RMA the board took 2 days? Big difference.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I have to disagree.

I've used a lot of MSI boards, and generally, they are very unstable. ASUS isn't bad - aside from ease of using their support going downhill, they tend to have solid builds. However, I could crash most of the MSIs I've had on demand, regardless of OS.

Intel boards (like, Tyan), can be picky, but as long as you do your research before you buy the board, and get compatible parts, or make sure you aren't buying it for a system with incompatible parts (typically memory or PSU, even if it fits and is from a usually-good-quality manufacturer, it may not be ideal), you get a solid system. I've never managed that with MSI.

That being said... I would use the most of MSI boards I have had in certain situations - because their crashes were quite predictable, and if I knew a computer's use case wouldn't trigger the crash - why not use it, it's cheap. However, there was one board I literally snapped in half so it wouldn't accidentally or intentionally get put in another machine.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

Generally, I've found with intel, is that they are very sensitive to RAM voltage, even if it seems the memory would fit - the i7 certified sounds rather silly.
Anyway, do your research before buying any hardware to make sure it is listed as compatible.

The last MSI board I had seemed good, until I tried any two of:
- Run a TV Tuner
- Play an MMO
- Transfer large files over the network (typically local, the internet usually couldn't send me a file fast enough to trigger the issue).

It seemed some combination of multiple high-memory and high-network applications could crash the thing like a charm. Swapped it out for an ASUS, and everything else was the same... Worked like a charm.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

*shrug* of the three, only MSI has every caused me stability issues. Nonetheless, if you are using it for a business, yeah, you want to be a lot more careful, but then agian, you will probably be buying a pre-built from a vendor at that point.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I'd add Gigabyte to the list. Shame ABit isn't around, they made solid stuff too.

Tyan is also nice, but expensive and requires reading and only buying from the compatible parts list if you don't want it do die in a cloud of smoke... You get listed compatible parts, they work amazing. You don't, they go boom. I suspect their tolerances are much tighter than the industry standards - any anything outside of the range, but within industry standards, really ticks them off. However, it's a trade off, if you can keep withing tighter tolerances, you can usually stick to more consistent/better results.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

Depends on the topic.

Spices in the US are the same - as long as it's the same type (dried powder vs. dried powder, whole vs. whole), they are so regulated, it's pretty close to the same no matter what you get.

Some times, there is more money and effort spent in components and QA, in which case, "you get what you pay for" is a VERY safe bet.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

My expericne:

ASUS will give you slightly better performance and flexibility, but is *SLIGHTLY* less stable. Almost nobody will ever notice the difference.
Intel, is going to be more stable, but you have a slight speed loss and not as much flexibility (i.e. O.C., available feature sets).

There are more reliable board than ASUS, that don't have the drawbacks of Intel, but they are generally much more expensive, and often not worth it, so I'm not sure if they'd detract from the 'best money can buy' statement...

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I'd have to agree.

That 100 systems a year probably puts you over most of the posters here (including myself).

A thought - You might want to look at Tyan if you want a replacement for Intel. They are finicky as hell when it comes to compatible hardware (particularly memory/PSU), but if you stick to compatible stuff, they are very reliable, and the performance is pretty good too.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I've never seen and Intel board with an AMD socket, so assuming you run Intel exclusively.

Why would you have to run Intel exclusively? I have run Intel board machines with Intel CPUs, and nothing at all unpleasant happened to the AMDs on ASUS/ABIT/Gigabyte/Tyan's sitting nearby. Do they come out at night and eat the competators CPUs? Was I just lucky this didn't happen to me?

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

He's anon, that alone should tell you he (works for intel/is an intel fanboy).

Re:Overpriced

[slaker]

It's functionally the same thing in my case. I'm close enough to Intel's Louisville RMA depot that they'll have my RMA'd products the day I get authorization and have another one on a truck back to me the next day.

It still speaks very highly of their logistical operation that they process and ship returns that quickly.

Re:Overpriced

[Bengie]

I agree, that $20 800watt PSU is so much better than that other $120 600watt PSU.

Re:Overpriced

[slaker]

Yes. I run Intel exclusively. I don't have a problem with AMD CPUs as such, but no one operating in AMD-land is building system boards as generally reliable as are found on the Intel side of the fence. It does indeed help that there's an extremely narrow range of products where AMD is currently competitive for both price and performance at the moment, but I'd still rather deploy a small fleet of Intel-based systems and have the known-quantity experience than the crap-shoot of what Gigabyte or Asus might have for AM3+ this week.

I also like the fact that I can still find new-in-box Intel-branded motherboards even a couple years after production has stopped. This is really valuable if you have any reason to value uniformity in your configurations, which I certainly do.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless what is in the pill is not only Naproxin Sodium with some kind of coating, but if they add just the right amount of other substances (I really have very little knowledge on what those could be), maybe it makes the brand-name medicine act faster, be easier on the stomach, have longer lasting effects...or whatever might make the potential customers prefer it over the generic or other name brand.

Anecdotal evidence: My mom has a preference for a brand of ibuprofen pills the manufacturer included arginine along with it. The result is a faster-acting pain reliever which is what she wants/needs/expects when she takes that kind of pill. So, yes, better than the generic ibuprofen pill, even if there's less "active component" in the brand name.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I have had many motherboards over the last couple of decades and I have had many problems with Asus and MSI but have never had an issue with Intel.

In terms of top quality I still have to recommend SuperMicro, but those are expensive. I recommend Intel for the average user.

Re:Overpriced

[mark-t]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny or if you genuinely didn't understand, but I'm pretty sure that by "exclusively" the gp was only referring to the fact that you can't mix amd and intel on the *same* motherboard. In fact, that the gp even quite explicitly mentions this notion in the very sentence you quoted (saying he's "never seen an Intel board with an AMD socket").

Re:Overpriced

[jedidiah]

That basement dwelling WoW player is actually the one more likely to overpay for newer hardware that's somewhat faster but remarkably more expensive.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny or if you genuinely didn't understand, but I'm pretty sure that by "exclusively" the gp was only referring to the fact that you can't mix amd and intel on the *same* motherboard. In fact, that the gp even quite explicitly mentions this notion in the very sentence you quoted (saying he's "never seen an Intel board with an AMD socket").

Does Macys plug Gimbels?

Re:Overpriced

[lightknight]

AMD / Asus -> Crosshair motherboards. Built to overclock, and do so stably. I tend to use them for all of my builds, as their tolerances are exceptional. If someone needs more power, I just turn on the overclocking. It's like a free built-in upgrade. ;-)

Re:Overpriced

[justthinkit]

WHERE do you add Gigabyte to the list? Parent's list included three categories: "Ok", "junk" and "completely solid".

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I've built with all three of those brands. I've had problems with MSI and Intel.

The MSI boards I've used have always had issues being DOA. I eventually just gave up buying them entirely.

The Intel boards I've used have always been touchy about the memory used on them. Lots of weird timing issues tend to crop up, and more than once, I've had various OSes refuse to install (Windows, Ubuntu, even plain Debian). They also lack features that the other boards have. They're reference boards, and it shows.

Asus tends to ship with an out-of-date BIOS, but that's rather easily fixed. Other than that, I've never had any issues with an Asus motherboard. Video cards, though... just don't.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if there is a brand of motherboards that doesn't from time to time have incompatible RAM. It seems like such incompatibilities should not exist, but they do, with random combinations of brands of RAM and board series randomly but rarely not working together. Pretty much all of the major brands I've worked with in the last couple years did at one point, although maybe not every brand of RAM I've tried. It comes up when you are assembling computers for people that want whatever is cheap or on sale at the moment for RAM, but willing to spend more on the motherboard due to some spec requirement.

Re:Overpriced

[Guspaz]

Abit? Really? I'll admit to having limited experience, but the one Abit motherboard I ever owned, the KT7a, was a disaster. Not only for me, but everybody else; it had a reputation.

So, where do we start... There was the burst capacitors, there was the latency issues that caused crackling audio if you used a soundblaster card, there was the false promises about compatibility with future processors (don't sell a motherboard claiming it will support future processors if the very next processor using that socket to come out is unsupported), there was the refusal to replace boards affected by design flaws (like burst caps)... Of all the motherboards that I've ever owned or worked with, it was the worst, and Abit's handling of all these problems was atrocious. Even ECS' boards were better, and they were complete garbage.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

If money was involved you wouldn't be using DESKTOP motherboards for the job. Which is specifically what this references.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I also quit buying MSI after getting hit by some very funny compatibility affecting design choices, e.g. an AGP-8x board with VIA chipset and built-in graphics, that didn't take any of my NVIDIA AGP-8x graphics cards without forcing 4x mode. All Asus and Asrock now =)

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Spices in the US are the same

As someone who works in several aspects of restaurants and food distribution industry, this is really wrong. The spices you get in the supermarket might be all pretty similar, with maybe a little difference between the discount brands, i.e. the one cheaper than generic, and generic or name brands (assuming they are not too old from sitting on the shelf, a few spices are much better when fresher). Although there are a lot of other options, now much more accessibly thanks to the internet.

The only problem is that in general there might not be much of a correlation between price and spice quality. Although there is a correlation with sources not trying to BS you with marketing, which is a little more common with restaurant suppliers in my experience. In some cases, you can instantly smell the difference between crappy and good spices, and it is a bit harder to BS past that.

Re:Overpriced

[trum4n]

The only board i have ever had G.Skill not work on is Intel. Their hardware is certainly not worth the price premium. They are like BMW's. Not ever remotely worth the price.

Re:Overpriced

[spire3661]

OC = no point for the average PC user. OCing is for when you cant add anymore power with money. IN the last 10 years i have met 2 people who do things that actually make OCing a viable exercise. Everyone else is just burning out their chips for few real gains.

Re:Overpriced

[spire3661]

OCing is not a 'free' upgrade. You pay for it in longevity, stability and reliability.

Re:Overpriced

[Microlith]

Given the number of BIOS updates for the DQ77MK, and the remaining incompatibilities with various PCIe cards, I have to object. I've had far more luck with ASUS and MSI for motherboards. Even Gigabyte tends to put out good quality boards.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I find some of the responses to your post shocking... comparing Asus to Intel? Sure the Asus desktop boards have all the latest bells and whistles, but their early adoption schemes also lead to a variety of related issues and their boards have one of the third highest failure rates of all the boards our retail division carries, one year as high as 18% within-first-year failures (ECS being the first, at 31%). And Intel's failure rate? Until recently we had maybe one failed board a year, a less than 1% failure rate. Lately we've had a few more than we'd like but it's still less than 3%.
 
I have a feeling a number of responders have extensive experience... fixing their friends PC's.

Re:Overpriced

[MrNiCeGUi]

Hey, the K7S5A from ECS was a great board!

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I guess I meant supermarket spices.

In crappy vs. good however, I suspect the issue is more to do with age & handling conditions, which is less of an issue with dried spices, which most people use at home.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

The OK list.

Yeah, that board was made after VIA stopped making decent chipsets. Can't do much about that, and not everything ABit made was good. Even a good manufacturer can make a board on a bad chipset. You look at both.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

And I just replied to two different posts at once.
  Fuck me, I need coffee.

Re:Overpriced

[ByOhTek]

I had a NF7S v2, and nothing crashed the thing, even with decent overclocking. Used a few others as well.

But yeah, that board was made after VIA stopped making decent chipsets. Can't do much about that, and not everything ABit made was good. Even a good manufacturer can make a board on a bad chipset. You look at both.

Heh, MSI and Soyo were my worst experiences, by far.

Re:Overpriced

[TopSpin]

I tend to think that the high end ASUS boards are the best money can buy

My experience with ASUS has been frustration with low quality third party chips used to provide excessive numbers or SATA and USB ports and other features. These chips are never as good as the integrated Intel circuits. ASUS is the best of the non-Intel lot, but the others do the same thing; solder on whatever is cheapest and makes the specs look better, damn the bugs or driver issues. Intel also uses third party stuff but they're nowhere near as cavalier about it. Intel's work is not flawless, but they fix it when they screw up. If some Silicon Image chip on a Megasustrix motherboard doesn't work right they aren't going to fix it, or even acknowledge the problem.

I've always thought Intel motherboards only compete in the OEM sector.

That hasn't been true for years. On Newegg only ASUS has more (Intel based) motherboard models available than Intel; Intel has been very responsive to the market of people that want good boards. People like me have long since stopped debugging the poorly engineered products of all these little Taiwanese board makers. My last three personal machines were Intel boards and they're all still running perfectly. Two survived transition from XP to Windows 7 with no driver drama; the OS recognized all the important bits out-of-the-box, which is exactly what I expected and intended.

Dear ASUS, this is an opportunity beyond simply gobbling up the market Intel leaves behind. Now is the time to step up your engineering and qualification of components and produce a line of grown-up boards. I don't need or want 35 USB ports provided by 3 phy implementations, all different. I want conservative, well engineered boards that run cool and don't leak capacitor juice all over the place three years after I buy it. Thanks.

Re:Overpriced

[period3]

"Slighty less stable"? Something is either stable or it isn't. Maybe the word you're looking for is "unstable". Not sure who you deal with, but everyone I know would notice and not tolerate instability or a crash. Modern OSes are pretty reliable. Kernel panics and blue screens are so rare that when they happen, it's noticed.

Re:Overpriced

[UltraZelda64]

I have a Gateway machine from 2001. I'm pretty sure it has an Intel motherboard, and it was running rock-solid until I decided to give it a break a year or two ago. Bad idea; it ran flawlessly up to that point, but about a year with no power seemed to to cause all kinds of things to go wrong with it. And ironically, the motherboard is not one of the parts to go. That thing has been rock-solid, along with its 1.7GHz Pentium 4 processor. Its original hard drive has only begun to show signs of damage a few years ago.

Re:Overpriced

[Hamsterdan]

It probably needs a recap. I had to replace the caps on a Dell Optiplex 280 (wouldn't boot). Now runs flawlessly at a friend's place. cost me about 5$ in capacitors.

Many things today go bad because of either bad caps (Viewsonic VA1912, RCA AV Receiver, that Dell, One of my previous machines, or bad solder joints (thank you lead-free solder, just revived an old 52" RPTV just by resoldering the flyback. Found it on christmas eve, was thrown away because it totally lost its convergence)

Re:Overpriced

[Hamsterdan]

Ditto, never had any issues with the two I owned

Re:Overpriced

[Hamsterdan]

OC means running a 150$ CPU at the same specs Intel would like you to pay 800$ for. But yes, for the average user, any modern PC will be fast enough, even the wallmart junk.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and when stuff fails major OEM specs, they slap hot pink heatsinks onto it and sell it to the gamers. They're buying speed not reliability.

Re:Overpriced

[Smauler]

If the company you're buying from spends a lot on marketing and advertising, what you get if you pay more is more adverts.

I consciously try to buy from brands that do not advertise as much (though sometimes this is difficult).

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. I worked as an production support engineer at a mid-size OEM for almost 10 years. I saw over a hundred thousand computer built in my time there. Hands-down, Intel had the lowest defect rate new from manufacturer and over time in the field. In the more recent years, FoxConn started delivering boards almost as good. Guess you learn a thing or two when manufacturing for the big boys. Overall, all motherboards are FAR more reliable than they were 15 years ago.

Re:Overpriced

[slaker]

Tyan does not make inexpensive boards for vanilla desktops. I can remember a time when they did, but that was probably the mid-90s.

Re:Overpriced

[spire3661]

An i5 at i7 speeds is not the same thing as a real i7. An i7 1155 is not the same thing as an i7 socket 2011. When you buy a $150 processor and OC it, you arent getting an $800 processor, nor are you gaining $650 in value. Its a fools game that was figured out a long time ago by intel and 'gaming' companies. The intel K procesors are perfectly positioned for suckers to buy them and think they are getting away with something. OCing mattered when we had Celeron 300As, it doesnt matter now outside of select use cases. If you are going to OC, start with an i7 at least, otherwise you are just masturbating.

Re:Overpriced

[slaker]

What did I say that sounds like "I want to overclock a fleet of business desktop systems?" In my experience, Asus's definition of "stable" and mine are two entirely different things.

Re:Overpriced

[Smauler]

There are different degrees of stability. A board that crashes once every 5 years is more stable than a board that crashes once every 5 minutes. Are you really arguing that something is stable or it isn't?

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

The reply was in reference to dried spices, not fresh ones. Age and handling is part of it, but so is the starting ingredients. Even something as simple and common as dried oregano can vary from fragrant and strongly flavored to effectively gritty, bland flakes of cardboard.

The problem is most people don't buy spices very frequently, and their quality is typically masked by other ingredients used in a dish. So there isn't much incentive for a supermarket to carry a variety of quality, which is why many have just two or three kinds: a discount, a generic and a name brand (and maybe now an organic one). A lot of the time, the differences are more just to trick people into perceived quality, by making it look better, or from some exotic location, or that people expect name brand to be better. Whereas at a restaurant, they may be buying a giant container of it every week, are trying to minimize costs on it while still keeping a certain level of quality, and may be cooking foods where a difference is noticeable (for many foods, it takes a substantial difference in spice quality to be noticed, so most of the time, it doesn't really matter much...).

It seems on par with some computer parts. There are parts where the performance is directly noticed and part of what someone wants, e.g. the cpu speed. There are other parts that as long as it works and has basic features, changes in performance won't be noticed unless drastic. How many people know or care what motherboard they have in their system versus what speed cpu and size of hard drive? Some enthusiasts might care and make use of overclocking features, etc., although, most of the time they don't buy new motherboards frequently. Contrasted that with a business that buys equipment weekly, they will notice quickly if something sucks, and can change what they buy (assuming they don't have too much bureaucracy). To some degree, it seems like business side of sales cuts some of the BS (although there is still buzzword compliance from time to time), as opposed to some of the enthusiast stuff that seems to push form over function. "You get what you pay for," hence seems more common on the business side, although still applies on home use stuff if you look at what is meant for enthusiasts, but disregarding what is gimmicky and more marketing than function.

Although originally, it seems some people miss the point. "You get what you pay for," is not some absolute law, but more just a correlation. How good of a correlation it is can vary wildly from product to product, or context to context, but still around in most places to some degree. It also says nothing of what the slope and nature of that correlation is... you could still have to pay 10x as much for 10% gain.

Re:Overpriced

[viperidaenz]

So it's not because G.Skill requires higher voltages to work at its claimed speed? It's not like Intel store a list of vendors who are not "I7 Certified" in each motherboard so they can fail to boot.

Re:Overpriced

[viperidaenz]

So obviously cost was the factor, not performance.

Re:Overpriced

[Jeng]

The problem is that the performance you get from overclocking is not worth the instability.

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway

Re:Overpriced

[hairyfeet]

Bullshit, Asus/Asrock (they are merging into one company) and Gigabyte make damned good boards but you simply have to choose a board designed for your use case. If you want to be gaming and A/V editing if you choose that $29.99 board designed to give grandma a cheap but stable platform to play her FB games you really only have yourself to blame.

I have been using Asusrock and Gigabyte for years without a bit of hassle, the few times I had to walk a customer through changing any setting on either company's boards the problem ended up being PEBKAC, for example they had me put in a gamer board and they then proceeded to buy a bunch of RAM that was bottom of the barrel off of eBay and then was shocked when the board would hang. But you use a little common sense, don't buy a good board and then fill it with eBay special parts and you'll be fine.

BTW does anybody else find it extra douchey that Intel ran Nvidia out of the motherboard chipset business only for them to bail on the business? Between that and Intel hand in hand with MSFT killing the netbook market (because without ION an Atom was painful to use and Intel and MSFT both dream of being Apple) I just hope AMD doesn't end up going under, their chips are still crazy fast for most use cases and Intel is just the poster boy for sleazy corporate crap.

Re:Overpriced

[oursland]

A board that crashes once every 5 years

Sounds an awful lot like a different kind of fault than

A board that crashes once every 5 years

Re:Overpriced

[danomac]

I have an Intel mobo (can't recall the model) with my QX9650 and it's definitely overclockable. Gives you a couple warning when you mess with setting manually though. The board was about $140 if I remember correctly. My system is old, but not slow.

Re:Overpriced

[danomac]

We made the mistake of using Asus boards in machines at work. I really regret that now, as the Asus boards are horribly unreliable, and some of them were not cheap either.

The older Intel boards are still chugging along just fine. One of those computers is close to 8 years old. Anything we had from Asus died long before that.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be on their period.....

Re:Overpriced

[Jeng]

I had a number of ECS builds from Fry motherboard+cpu combo deals. They worked, but I wouldn't exactly call them stable, they also tended to not support features very well.

I had one ABIT board, it worked very well until I physically damaged it when installing an oversized heatsink.

Re:Overpriced

[Jeng]

What time period did you purchase those Asus boards in?

Was it the everything was failing because of bad caps time period?

Also usually if there is instability with a product it is best to look at other products that use the same chipset to see if it is the manufacturer or the chipset.

Re:Overpriced

[ganjadude]

This may be true now, I havent been paying attention but there was a period of time when you could OC a processor and you could get it. I remember the original AMD phenoms were great for this. They even sold some 3 core processors that had a 4th core that was locked down and you could unlock it!

Re:Overpriced

[Marcion]

Compared to ASUS and MSI motherboards, Intel ones are (were) overpriced. I can't imagine anyone will miss them.

That was exactly my first thought. Intel didn't price their boards very competitively, probably out of a desire not to annoy the downstream manufacturers. I often admired the Intel mobos but always then went and bought an ASUS instead, the extra money saved can be spent on the processor and RAM.

Re:Overpriced

[danomac]

I'm pretty sure the capacitor plague was from the early 2000s to 2006 or so. The affected equipment we had to replace was from 2008/2009.

The bizarre thing is that the Asus boards had Intel chipsets on them. I don't think that was the cause. I did check the boards visually, and back in 2005 or so we had quite a few ruptured caps.

Re:Overpriced

[mrprogrammerman]

I remember when I used to use non-Intel motherboards I would get all kinds of weird problems and sometimes blue screens that couldn't be really explained. With Intel motherboards the stability really increases.

Re:Overpriced

[Guspaz]

The KT133a was definitely a bunk chipset, sure. But most of my problems stemmed from Abit. The "future processor" thing really aggravated me, for example.

The KT7a came out in mid 2001. The AthlonXP came out a few months later in late 2001. The KT7a was plastered with, as one of the features listed, "Supports future socket A CPUs!" or some such thing. However, the very next CPU model that comes out (AthlonXP), only a few months later, was not supported. Abit claimed it was a "hardware limitation", and that only a newer revision of the KT7a would support the XP. Existing users, who bought the board, expecting it would work with the AthlonXP when available, got shafted, and Abit just said "tough luck".

I ended up sticking an AthlonXP 1900+ in the board anyhow, and it more or less worked. There were a few quirks, and the motherboard was utterly convinced it was using a ridiculously highly clocked Athlon 4 mobile processor, (the Athlon 4 was the mobile version of the AthlonXP, and came out half a year before the desktop version). That worked well enough... but the burst capacitor issue made it all kind of moot, and I lived for years with a computer that would frequently spontaneously reboot itself, since I couldn't afford a replacement, and abit refused to fix it (the class action lawsuit against abit was only settled four years later, and didn't cover Canadian customers).

Abit may have made some decent products, but they burned me so badly that I was quite pleased when they went out of business. I had a certain satisfaction that karma had caught up with them.

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Every MSI and ASUS i ever had was AMD powered, and far superior to that LGA crap simply because it had pins and wasn't completely disabled by a little vibration. With my years of experience in the field, i just have to say, i will never buy anything with the Intel badge again.

So apparently during all those years of "experience" you somehow avoided noticing that in product lines where reliability is of utmost importance, AMD uses LGA sockets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_G34

Jackass.

Re:Overpriced

[toddestan]

If you would not tolerate instability and crashes, your PC would have dual power supplies, have ECC memory, run RAID 1, and basically look like an IBM mainframe and cost as much as one. Fact is, people are willing to put up with some crashes, instability, and downtime to get a computer that costs $500 and not $25,000. The question is, how much?

Re:Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW does anybody else find it extra douchey that Intel ran Nvidia out of the motherboard chipset business only for them to bail on the business?

Pay attention for once, hairydumbass. Intel is exiting the motherboard business. They aren't exiting the motherboard chipset business. These things are not the same!

(Also, after Intel pushed NVidia out, Intel became the sole source of chipsets for its desktop CPUs. The only sense in which Intel is planning on "exiting" that market is that in the long run that market won't exist. Like everyone else, Intel is integrating more and more functions into the CPU. Eventually there will be no need for a "chipset", everything will be on one chip.)

Re:Overpriced

[greenfruitsalad]

which idiot modded this informative?
there are computers in this world that aren't just used for mp3 encoding. i need to run hundreds of (usually idle) processes on my servers and therefore prefer 16 core opterons to Intel's xeons. responsiveness of our opteron systems is much higher than that of our xeon ones.

Re:Overpriced

[zipn00b]

I don't know if Intel still does this (but no reason to suspect otherwise) but they used to often sell internally used computers to their employees dirt cheap. However they weren't necessarily the boards that were sent out to the market and thus could be more like engineering tests. I hated getting a call into the helpdesk from Intel employees where the first thing they said is they'd just bought this machine for personal use from the company.......

Re:Overpriced

[Hamsterdan]

If done properly it's gonna be stable, most processors are sold at lower specs to meet market demands.

I've done my 486 (66@80), my AMD 486 (133@160), P166MMX@200, K6-2 266@338, Cel300a@450, Dual Cel300a@450, Athlon XP-m 2500+ @ 3200+ speeds. That one is capable of reaching 2.5Ghz, but not without upping the voltage, thus running at 2.2 stock voltage. Athlon X2 4200+ @ 2.4, P4s have been done, even my Powermac. I never went over 10% over voltage specs, and never tried to reach twice the speeds. If done in a sensible way, Overclocking was a way to boost performance, but I agree that nowadays it's a moot point since even the walmart junk is plenty enough for almost everybody.

I will still use my desktop computer

[Quakeulf]

I really need my high-end desktop computer to do my job. How long until something will happen to this market segment will disappear as well? I cannot, for the life of me, see me doing my graphics, game development and 3D on a tablet unless it gets powerful enough for my needs.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Get serious, a GameBoy is powerful enough for your needs.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[fredprado]

This market segment won't disappear anytime soon, if it will at all.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Ami Ganguli]

There's still a need for the "gamer" PC, and that niche will continue to exist.

But for most of us, there are better alternatives. I just bought one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing systems a couple of days ago. I'm thrilled with it so far. It's totally quiet, mounts discretely on the side of my desk, supports two monitors, and is plenty fast enough for my software development needs.

I don't develop games, but I imagine that most users will be playing games on tablet-like devices in the near future, so a system like mine probably has more gaming horsepower than the average tablet as well.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. I need to for heavy duty electromagnetic software for RF and antenna design. Other than HP, which I can't stand, who makes high end motherboards for Xeon processors that have multiple PCI slots for GPU accelerators. I fear this will hurt the third party system builders such as Microway. I don't want an HP workstation; overpriced.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. My desktop is reasonably recent but still sometimes too slow for the tasks I'm using it for: programming, typesetting, gaming. Not instant-reponse and snappy at all, even though I'm running GNU/Linux with XFCE. Computers just can't be fast enough for me.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[laffer1]

That system only has a core i3 in it. There are reasons some of us need CPU power besides gaming. My desktop spends a great deal of time compiling software. Intel and AMD have made it clear they don't want me as a customer, but the problem is that I have no where else to go.

Intel's on a race to the bottom with ARM. AMD is on a race to extinction.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Almir43]

So, you *can* see it happening then.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ewww. I already have 16GB ram and 8 cores at 4Ghz and 3 monitors. This would be a serious downgrade. I built it last year and upgraded the CPU last month.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a professional photographer. I need vastly more processor power, storage space and screen real estate than any tablet or laptop could ever offer me. So yes, the desktop computer market still makes sense, maybe not for everybody, but at least for specialized groups.

If anyone will ever come up with a 2x eight core, 64Gb RAM, 9.3Tb RAID5, Quadro 6000 and 30" + 24" IPS screens, I'll gladly switch. Until then, you can pry my desktop from my cold, dead fingers. (yes, those are the actual specs of the machine I just built last month, minus the screens which were transferred from the outgoing computer to the new one)

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[SuricouRaven]

There will be a need for high-power professional and enthusiast machines for a long time. You'll still be able to get them - but as they become a niche product and volume goes down, there may be a corresponding rise in price.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

And there will still be desktop motherboards made. Intel is just going to manufacture them anymore. Asus, ASROCK, MSI, EVGA, etc... will still make intel chipset motherboards.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[h4rr4r]

My year old Air stomps all over this thing.

If I want a real PC I don't care how big it is, if I want something tiny I am willing to pay enough to get something better.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[h4rr4r]

HP makes no motherboards they are buying them from someone else.

Newegg shows ASUS and EVGA both have boards like this. I was a little surprised Tyan was not represented.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

With an AMD socket? Intel is also getting out of the desktop CPU market, you know. Unless the OEMs want to try selling boards with Intel's chips soldered on, Intel will effectively be out of the desktop market within a few years.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[CastrTroy]

The again, the price of server class machines have been coming down quite a bit, so at some point it might just make more sense to have a server on your desk if you need some serious power. The advantage of using a server is that you get serious room for expansion. Many server models support int the hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and you also have the ability to have multiple CPUs. Plus you get a real RAID controller, and things like redundant power supplies.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[suprcvic]

Why do I never have mod points when I need them? +1 Funny.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure because things are getting more inter-connected too so you may be in a situation where you buy a house power box to put in your hows that the tv, phone and table offload work to. Like a private on-live to affair.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Mad Merlin]

2x eight core, 64Gb RAM, 9.3Tb RAID5, Quadro 6000 and 30" + 24" IPS screens

You dropped $2200*-$4200** on CPUs, but only put 64G ($500) of RAM in the machine? Cheapskate.

• * Xeon E5-2650 = $1107
• ** Xeon E5-2960 = $2061

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the processor, or the memory that's getting the axe. I'm guessing Intel will still make those....it's only everything around those two that is getting discontinued. See? no harm done.

Is this the wake-up call that AMD has been waiting for to get their act together and get back in the game? hmmmm

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Grizzley9]

I want to like Intel's NUC, but I just can't find a reason for it that isn't better served with other hardware (sometimes cheaper considering all you have to buy for it) and very seldom is form factor the primary concern. Why not just get a mini tower? It needed to come out 2-3 years ago and the Mac Mini beat them by a long shot, plus it needs USB 3.0 instead.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[NixieBunny]

Desktop systems won't go away, since they're used by Intel et. al. to design motherboards and processors, so they know what's up.

They'll just get more expensive as the demand goes down, and they'll only be sold by vendors of professional gear.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[jedidiah]

The NUC is just this years iteration of the ION nettop or Mac Mini.

It's not a real desktop replacement.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[lightknight]

AMD is currently getting out of the game, and will be unable to take advantage of this opportunity, as their intelligentsia had a vision that said "ARM is the future, let's drop everything and go THATAWAY!" several months ago. That such a large market opportunity has suddenly appeared, and will go unfulfilled, is only further proof that AMD's leadership (or perhaps their previous leadership, seems to be a revolving door there somewhere) needs to be taken out back by the investors, and Old Yeller'ed.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Sockatume]

An example: once upon a time if you wanted to use a computer you'd sit down at a dumb terminal that talked to whatever monster your institution had in the basement. Then "personal computers" came, and they were slow, riotously expensive per unit computing power, and used this horrible mouse thing to operate, but the big smart machines didn't go away. They just receded to the people that actually needed them, where they remain to this day.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[lightknight]

Only 16GB of RAM? Was the paycheck late?

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Complete overkill. You would see no loss in performance with a lesser machine than that.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Sebastopol]

Here's what I see happening:

In the post-desktop future you'll pay $200 for a physical terminal you can plug into a keyboard & mouse and into your HDMI jumbo OLED TV (e.g., a Mac Mini running VNC), and then pay a fee per month to log in and develop on a remote machine with 100-10,000x more compute speed than any desktop you can buy or build today.

The future is distributed computing. Let someone else pay to maintain the TFLOP hardware.

Amazon already offers this service. I can rent time on linux compute servers that they maintain, just like the mainframe model in the 60's to 90's (I went to RPI and we ran jobs on an MTS mainframe until 1991!!). But you have to run your software. I honestly expect Adobe and Maya to release packages to distributed computing services like this in the near future.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[spire3661]

Yep. Intel NUC is overpriced, underpowered and spec'd badly. I really wanted to like it, as it would be perfect in my wiring closet, but IM not paying $300 for a gimped barebones that has overheat issues and no power cord. For what it would cost me to build a NUC i could jsut as easily build another i5 powered Antec 310-150. Sure its a bit bigger, but its vastly more flexible and powerful.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because that is what he actually needs? I can't speak for him, but in my case that is similar to what I use for running some numerical computational models. The models don't have any space-speed trade offs that would be accessible by increasing the RAM by a factor 2 (or even 16), so more RAM isn't going to accomplish anything and would just be a waste of money. More cores on the other hand at similar speeds, would make a considerable difference.

Also, you could easily get a dual 8-core setup, for both CPUs and motherboard for under $1000 is you went with AMD. I have no idea if that would meet the needs for photography software, etc., but for some use cases, works much better than investing in Xeon chips.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[tlhIngan]

I really need my high-end desktop computer to do my job. How long until something will happen to this market segment will disappear as well? I cannot, for the life of me, see me doing my graphics, game development and 3D on a tablet unless it gets powerful enough for my needs.

It'll always be around. Just like most people don't need pickup trucks to do the grocery run, but we still have 'em for the jobs that often do require them, or for the people who feel they want them.

There will always be a need. The "problem" with PCs these days is they are a commodity. And commoditization is both a good and bad thing - for consumers, it's insanely good as it means low prices (and the starting price of a computer is only around $200 on sale). On the flip side, manufacturers of commodity goods seek out ways to cut costs to make money - if it costs $150 to make that $200 PC, then after all is said and done, you better have insane volumes because after everyone's had their cut, you're looking at maybe $5 per PC profit (and this doesn't include warranty).

It's why PCs come loaded with crapware (the money paid for thes advertising offsets a part of the cost - more profit), why you get things like 1366x768 screens (incrediblly cheap because the circuits and panels are cranked out by the billions) and cases that slice better than the best knives (because deburring is another step, and it's cheaper to issue gloves).

Basically, Intel's decided that the amount of money made by making motherboards is so little compared to the designing and other work that goes into them that it's cheaper to get out of that and leave it for the many motherboard companies to do. It's why IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo (IBM couldn't compete, or rather, the margins were much too low), or why Apple refuses to sell Macs below $1000 (the Mac Mini has risen in price, and doesn't come with a screen, keyboard or mouse which every $600 desktop PC comes with). Or why HP wants to "refocus", or Dell being in a small bit of trouble.

Or why netbooks died out for tablets, or why ultrabooks are popular with manufacturers and cost so much more. Or why Seagate and Western Digital are the only two spinny rust storage manufacturers out there (there are smaller players like Toshiba who make laptop drives, but I expect them to die out soon as well).

Eventually attrition will take its toll, but as long as there are people buying desktop PCs, there will be people making stuff for them.

However, as the popularity of other computing devices increases, be prepared for a rise in the cost of a desktop PC as it becomes a more niche product and manufacturers start demanding higher margins for slower moving products.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't need half of that. But as a professional photographer, if he isn't spending an equivalent amount on his monitors, he's not fooling anyone. LCDs still suck compared to CRTs in terms of gamut and contrast ratios.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[baka_toroi]

You dropped $30.000* - $80.000* on a house, but only put 2 ($4200) CPUs in the machine? Cheapskate. * House 1 = $30.000 * House 2 = $80.000

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Quakeulf]

Oh I screwed up royally, I meant to write "How long until something will happen to this market segment; will it disappear as well?"

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[csubi]

You dropped $2200*-$4200** on CPUs, but only put 64G ($500) of RAM in the machine? Cheapskate.

Or $600 : cheapest Opteron 8 core..

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[oursland]

I find it interesting that you believe the price of the components is more important in the design of a machine than whether or not the selected components meet the requirements of the task. Would you also prefer Monster HDMI cables over the Monoprice DVI or HDMI variety for the same reason?

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The screens are a 30" Eizo and a 24" Quatrographic.

Regarding not needing half of that, I beg to differ. Try stitching a pano made of 20 raw files from an 80 Megapixel digital back. Try processing files from, say, a Betterlight Super 10K back.I frequently shoot architectural stuff with large format technical cameras, or at least with a Canon 5d mkIII and tilt/shift lenses if I'm travelling light. it's not uncommon to stich the final image from dozens of images. Now consider each of those dozen files is a minimum 22 Megapixel (Canon 5d mkIII), right to ~600Mb for a 48 bit Betterlight file. I also do a lot of macro work, where sometimes an image is made out of stacking 100+ images, so everything is in focus. It gets painfully slow really quickly without a REALLY fast machine. I don't like to take days to process stuff, the sooner I can hand the final work to the clients the better, it means I can start with another job sooner.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[epyT-R]

oh goody I can't wait to have my 'local' computing limits dictated by artificial social and business interests. If I can't control the core tools I depend on, there is no job or financial security. I'll pass.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, you are running a server board and the TFA is about desktop boards.
Secondly, miniaturization is happening people. Bitch and moan all you want but the spate of grunt versus miniaturization is a diminishing sliding timescale. A system running NUC will easily clean the board with the most powerful system from not all that long ago, and the gap is closing.

So Intel decide to ramp up research into this area. A smart decision to concentrate efforts on the small form factor. It makes sense, it is what people have proven time and again to want. It wont be too long now where a clunker on the desktop is relegated to historical archives and lessons for children in classrooms.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is currently getting out of the game, and will be unable to take advantage of this opportunity, as their intelligentsia had a vision that said "ARM is the future, let's drop everything and go THATAWAY!" several months ago. That such a large market opportunity has suddenly appeared, and will go unfulfilled, is only further proof that AMD's leadership (or perhaps their previous leadership, seems to be a revolving door there somewhere) needs to be taken out back by the investors, and Old Yeller'ed.

Um, dude? I hate to rain on a quality rant but this story is not about an opportunity for AMD. It's about Intel getting out of selling Intel-branded motherboards into the retail channel (ie for use by enthusiast builders). Intel's competition in this space is Asus, GIGABYTE, etc. Those are the guys who can (and will) benefit from this. AMD? Not so much. It would kinda be shooting themselves in their own foot to make motherboards for their competition's CPUs.

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Not even remotely interesting. Seriously. NEXT!

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Mad Merlin]

In the same way that SSDs help virtually all workloads in a big way, so does more RAM, by functioning as an extended disk cache. All modern operating systems do this transparently, possibly even Windows these days. Unless your entire data set (including the stuff stored on disk) is smaller than RAM, then more RAM will help. In light of the 10T disk array, it's very likely that his dataset is quite large, and any time those CPUs need to hit the disk for data, they're going to be starved.

With dual E5s, you can have up to 256G of RAM for a linear cost increase from 64G (or 512G for a very large premium).

Re:I will still use my desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says nothing about processors, just MOBO's...

I'm probably old

[Anonymous Coward]

because I don't find it comfortable at all to use a tablet for typing up a document on a tablet. Even some websites I visit still aren't properly formatted for tablet use, thus requiring use of a laptop/desktop.

My concern:

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this put more credence into the no more LGA sockets rumor?

Re:My concern:

[MarioMax]

Don't expect LGA sockets to go away completely. Maybe low and mid-range chips will go BGA, but high-end chips will likely be LGA for the forseeable future. At least in this humble geek's opinion.

Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[Compaqt]

For a while, it seemed like Intel would dominate the mboard market.

After all, everything was being integrated onto boards (sound, network, Intel good-enough graphics, etc.). Add to that the processor itself, and you've got great vertical integration.

It's hard to believe Intel would give a better deal to an outsider (Gigabyte, MSI, etc.) than to its internal mboard division, no matter what accounting system is used.

So it's hard to figure this out.

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly!

My first thought was monopoly breakup by the government but apparently Intel decided this on its own!? Maybe to dodge monopoly accusation?

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[alen]

PC's as a market segment are losing money

Intel spent a few years hiding in its margins. PC components have a higher dollar profit than mobile ones. but few people are buying the traditional type of computer these days and so the costs of R&D/Production and other costs outweigh the profits

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to believe Intel would give a better deal to an outsider (Gigabyte, MSI, etc.)

Intel has a reputation to protect. Nobody is really surprised if AssRock cuts corners on your motherboard's capacitors, but if Intel does it, people would be bitching about it for a decade. There are still people who joke about the Pentium FDIV bug!

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[Sockatume]

Almost everything you described is going into the CPU these days to cut down power and size.

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[Kjella]

Between laptops, tablets and AIOs the ratio of custom to standard motherboards has been going more and more in the direction of custom boards, while Intel is moving more and more of the functionality onto the chip itself. If the leaks are correct both the lowest power versions of Haswell (ULT and ULX) will be system-on-a-chip. More importantly, since Intel is now the only supplier of chipsets to Intel CPUs they effectively control the features and prices of motherboards anyway, while giving the illusion of competition. I'm quite sure Intel is the one with the best information on where Intel is going in the near future and why this division isn't worth keeping.

Re:Monopolist voluntarily leaves the field?

[TopherC]

The motherboard and chipset don't have to be sold with a profit margin since they support CPU sales. It may not even have to do with the profitability of the desktop market. Investors play a large role in steering public corporations. Investors are interested in growth potential, almost to the exclusion of all else.

They don't see growth potential in the desktop market therefore they declare it to be "dead" (meaning saturated). They see instead, and mostly with hindsight, growth potential in the tablet and smartphone markets. So it's the potential for growth in emergent markets which dictates stock prices rather than the health and viability of existing markets. I'm worried about the disconnect here. It doesn't matter whether or not people want tablets instead of laptops and desktops, it only matters that the tablet market is not yet fully saturated.

Not dying, just role diminished

[Anonymous Coward]

It was not log ago every one had a pc. Soon everyone will still have a pc, but since a large swath of the population a tablet fits their needs, not everyone will bother with a traditional pc.

To use a car analogy, suppose cars did not exist. Once invented a large percent of the population found the fit their needs better than the trucks they had driven. Their were still people that truly needed a truck, so they kept them. Truck sales while not dead, where greatly diminished.

One word: Competition

[x0d]

If we have less brands to choose from, the other ones won't have any reason to keep their prices low. So everything will get more and more expensive in no time, while the PC market will continue to shrink.

Even old P4 Era Intel Boards where the best

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a computer recycling center, and a few of the local OEMs used Intel Motherboards for everything, They are the easiest to work on and I've never seen a bad part on them since I started working there (4 Years)

Such a shame, I was going to buy intel for my next board

Really. They Mean it.

[retroworks]

This is a long told story (updating announcments made 3 years ago). It's the equivalent of GMC saying they will leave the pickup truck market to focus on sedans due to strong competition from Ford and Toyota (watch for Hyundai to enter the market). It's unlikely Intel would return to PC boards as the market competition becomes more suppliers in a shrinking market, but just as Volkswagon can change its mind and make Beetles again, Intel is not barred from returning except for the decline in volume of demand. This story is "We mean it. We really are going to stop making pickup trucks, because fewer people are buying pickup trucks and other people are making them as well as we do". It's not the end of the pickup truck market and it's not the end of GMC. Ok, got it.

I wanted a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I figure Android will take over, but for the moment content creation means a desktop PC running Windows for me. Xara X, Photoshop, Eclipse, and a few other apps.

So I went to do a final upgrade which was supposed to last me till the switch to Android. I wanted something:

1. Fast, i5 maybe i7
2. 4Gb memory, it has to last me a few years
3. Not upgradable, I don't want to twiddle and I don't want a lot of connectors that come loose.
4. 1TB Raid 1, content I create is important, I want a RAID, and at least enough space for videos
5. High res, I see there are 27 inch monitors with 2500 pixels across and it should drive those without problem
6. Windows 7, if its a desktop why would I want some mangled software that is Windows 8?!

I couldn't find one, they were all big towers with slots and RAID1 was only on big towers.
Intels NUC seemed like it would be the solution, but they've crippled it with i3 and no raid, and mobile harddisks.

I think Intel really needs to up it's game. I have a lot of ARM kit and it's all quiet and small and no fuss and I want those features in any desktop PC.

Beginning of the end of the homebuilt desktop

[crazyjj]

I have a Terminator-like vision of a dark future where everything is a all-in-one, laptop, or tablet--and all are walled gardens.

Re:Beginning of the end of the homebuilt desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

This all-in-one tablet-esque world would absolutely suck if it's handled in an iPad/iMac sort of way where you really have no room for upgrades other than what you bought and have on the table in front of you. The only way you'd be able to pry my hands off of a desktop tower would be if one of these all-in-one units would be able to put out the processing power I need, amount of monitors I need, and are so crazy ridiculous cheap that if I need to upgrade to a faster model I can do so with extreme sub-100 dollar ease (similar to how I'd upgrade RAM in a desktop or a faster processor). I'm all about mobile devices, don't get me wrong. I have a tablet I rely on quite heavily for my tasks at work and I've been floored at how a tablet has kind of created it's own well deserved place in my I.T. bag of tricks, but in no way shape or form will I be parting ways with a laptop or desktop. My needs for computing scale over a very wide array, so I have uses for each device, especially my desktop. There's also my home server I have running, which I'm not entirely convinced you could scale down any more without losing a substantial degree of functionality. I mean, I could get some ultra slim unit to put in, but wait - I've already done that with a book-sized nettop oriented system, and it sucked, because I had USB drives hanging off of the thing all over the place since the thing was so small I had no room for my flipping storage drives. I bought a new setup which uses a regular ATX tower with a Micro ATX board and a stack of hard drives, and we're back in total nirvana.

My 2c.

Re:Beginning of the end of the homebuilt desktop

[Osgeld]

there were homebuilt desktops before intel started "making" motherboards, they will still be around after ... intel isnt the only one making mobo's for intel chips

Re:Beginning of the end of the homebuilt desktop

[jader3rd]

I have a Terminator-like vision of a dark future where everything is a all-in-one, laptop, or tablet--and all are walled gardens.

I struggle to see how having a major player break up its presence in a market, to multiple competitors, the sign that it's going to be harder to purchase individual parts.

It's quite simple, really.

[Dcnjoe60]

It's quite simple, really. Intel, monopolist or not, can make more money by utilizing its resources elsewhere than in the the desktop market. All of the hype is in the tablet/phone/ultrabook market and that is where they are shifting their resources. It's quite simple, really. The cost to design and produce a board for a tablet is not significantly different than that of a desktop. On the other hand, a tablet board will probably out sell a desktop board 100 to 1 if not more. As such, the ROI on the tablet board is far greater than on the desktop.

For most users, particularly those that are simply consumers of content, the modern PC is overkill, at least in the world of online services where even the fastest consumer internet connection is a bottleneck for the underlying hardware.

Here's Hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's hoping that the Next Unit of Computing(NUC) is the small form factor powerhouse the industry needs.

Needed:

Small (4X4X2) is reasonable.
Fanless (at least silent)
Powerful (greater than Atom)
Incorporated power supply (if external, small)
Attractive case, not big ugly box.
Minimal wires(bundle the cables)

In other words, Apple Mac Mini. Never mind.

Awww

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww. I loved Intel boards. They were the only ones where there were no spelling mistakes in the manuals or bios. =(

Bye

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Oh and ditch the fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Or at least just one fan. My current PC has 4 fans in it, one for the PSU, one for the processor, one for the graphics card and one to take the air out of the box. That's ridiculous!

So
7. No fan or at most 1
8. Card reader.
9. I'm in two minds if it needs a DVD drive in it, I don't use them much, but then again some software is still sold on DVD... so yes I guess it should have one.

Can you fit that into a small neat box, 1/10th the volume of a mini tower. That's enough volume for the hard disks & drive, its currently not enough for the motherboard, processor huge heat sinks, big fans and all the empty space a desktop PC contains.

Re:Oh and ditch the fans

[h4rr4r]

There simply is not a big enough market for that,

The closest you will get is something like a mac mini. You could also start with a shuttle PC and go from there.

Most people do not care about the volume a PC takes up in an office, it sits under the desk. Hell, I bought a workstation ATX case more than 10 years ago and I intend to use it till the day I can't find a motherboard that mounts on some form of ATX, it is drilled for everything from Workstation ATX to mini ATX.

Don't buy hardware with skulls on it

[xtal]

My last foray into an Intel motherboard was a
X58 adorned with skulls. It didn't work very well.

I replaced it with an Asus.

The fact intel is making hardware adorned with skulls is confusing enough. An amendum to the don't buy audio equipment named after natural disasters rule of thumb, you shouldn't buy computer gear with skulls on it.

Enthusiast hardware isn't going anywhere, but it will be getting more expensive. Intel is a chip company not a motherboard company after all.

Re:Don't buy hardware with skulls on it

[semi-extrinsic]

I have to ask about your rule of thumb: which audio equipment are you referring to?

Re:Don't buy hardware with skulls on it

[slaker]

Typhoon, probably.

But yes, I would not even remotely trust an Intel enthusiast-class system board. Their LGA2011 boards aren't really impressive at all.
That's the point when Asus and Gigabyte and some of the other goofy hobbyist brands actually do make sense. For once.

Intel and AMD

[Mike Frett]

I agree with a lot of you that the Intel boards are Rock Solid and Stable; I have a P2 here with an Intel D865PERL that works like a charm. But Intel it seems are trying to completely remove itself from the Desktop market by using CPUs already attached to the Motherboard (Less Options, bad for Hobbyists) and now removing its own boards. I use AMD now, with a Rock Solid M5A97. It was in my price range and I don't regret it.

And here's AMD in the background waving at all of you that they're dedicated to DIYers by continuing the Socket brand and you all act like they don't exist and are running around like Chickens with no heads, yelling "The Desktop is DEAD!". Stop that, you look silly.

Re:Intel and AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

They're ignoring AMD because currently, they produce inferior products at pretty much every level in the desktop sector. They try to win on price but it's hard to win when you've got the 3570k beating the 8350 flagship hands down in things like gaming, oh and the 3570k costs less at places like microcenter by a good margin. Also outside of synthetic benchmarks the 3570k has been found to hold it's own in every respect or beat the 8350, so it's coming down to real world price/performance AMD doesn't deliver at the moment. The APU line I do enjoy for some HTPC action and pairing them with 6670's and an a10 5800k, but that's about it at this moment. And if you want to talk about gaming, even the 3220 or 3225 i3 can run games to the point you'll bottleneck the video card(even on some higher end cards), so it's getting harder and harder to sell AMD as a solid product.

Re:Intel and AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're "bottleneck[ing] the video card," then you have either a terrible card or a terrible bus. There isn't a CPU out there that can keep up with a quality, high-end GPU. You're selling Intel pretty hard, sure... but that's a little too hard.

Re:Intel and AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Total cost of an equivalent Intel build is still more than an equivalent AMD build since the AMD motherboards are less expensive.

Also AMD makes sense for people who upgrade their computer incrementally due to multigenerational compatibility.

Ie: I don't have to buy a complete new motherboard to upgrade my CPU and I don't have to buy a new CPU when I buy a new motherboard.

tablets need more storage space and bigger screen

[Joe_Dragon]

tablets need more storage space and bigger screens to replace pc's.

Also need a real keyboard and not a mini slide out one.

And no the Cloud can not replace storage space due to a mix of things like slow ISP speeds , wifi interference, the low caps on 3g / 4g as well the gaps in coverage.
Also the SUPER HIGH roaming fees. And the lag can be high on 3g / 4g as well.

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac mini no Raid1, only mini 2.5" HD, and doesn't run all the software I want. Checking the latest spec I see they can take it to i7 so it is fast. It also means if Apple can do it, then so can Intel.

I see from your comment you are a PC twiddler, but I don't think the number of people who slot things in their PCs (which is why they're all empty spare space and huge cases) outnumbers people who just use it as a PC.

Without the slots and all the dead space to accommodate cards that are never plugged in, why would you have such a big box?

Space is space, it's under the desk because it's so big. If it wasn't so big that problem wouldn't need fixing.

Re:I disagree

[h4rr4r]

The mac mini will run Windows 7 fine. Then you can run the software you want.

I am a geek yes, welcome to slashdot. If you want the tiny market device you are talking about you will too have to man up and do it yourself.

It is cheaper to make one case and one motherboard and use it to make the entry level PC and the high end unit.

It is under the desk because that is where the power is. It could be on the desk behind the monitor if that is where the power was. This is not a problem for 90% of users.

Re:I disagree

[jedidiah]

> It could be on the desk behind the monitor if that is where the power was. This is not a problem for 90% of users.

My office PC sits like this. It's about the size of an S1 Tivo can would probably make an acceptable HTPC for most people. You probably don't even have to dress it up any. It already looks like it could belong next to a BluRay player or an AV receiver.

Standard desktop size drives. Room for an after market video card. Smallish.

Office PC vendors like Dell and Compaq have been making machines like these since before Steve Jobs returned to Apple.

Re:I disagree

[h4rr4r]

Not if you want RAID1, limited amount of fans or be able to drive very high res screens. Nor are they likely to be available with i7s, most these days are i3s.

Re:I disagree

[spire3661]

Mac mini can hold 2 hard drives, the newest ones have SSD caching as well. My 2011 mac mini has a dual core i5 and 16 GB of ram and it runs win7 just fine. If you want a machine like a mac mini, you are going to have to buy a mac mini, because NO ONE else makes anything close to it. You could go with the Antec ISK, but it takes a bit of skill and patience.

Makes sense given the integration trends

[Anonymous Coward]

More and more functionality is being crammed into a single chip. So much so that the motherboard business is in a one way road to insignificance. Intel did great by getting out of the memory business when it became commoditized. I say, in retrospect, this move will be seen in similar terms.

Careful

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a dangerous game they are playing. If other manufacturers were to stop making motherboards for Intel processors it would be a major impact on Intel.

The person that made that decision is by chance the former CEO of HP is it?

Dell

[Anonymous Coward]

What's Dell going to do now?

Re:tablets need more storage space and bigger scre

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want a laptop (which is what you've described) then get a laptop.

The multi-faceted trends of dumbness

[SpaceManFlip]

So many things are going in the wrong direction with the computing world nowadays, with the proliferation of Facebooking dumbasses.
Apple sold lots of iPhones and iPads, so M$ decided to jump on their gravy train (again) and turn Windows 8 into iPad-bizarro-land...
PC sales declined because of tablet/pad sales, so OEM's decide they're in the wrong business and start to kill the Real Computer market...
Now I hear rumors that AT&T is planning to kill their land-based Internet services (DSL etc) in an attempt to move to all 3G/4G service plans. This is terrible for anyone who understands what latency is and how it makes your Internet suck. 3G connections usually have about 1000ms latency vs DSL sitting pretty at 40-50ms latency. But even worse, many rural areas still have no 3G service and some can actually get DSL or similar terrestrial lines.
All these trends look like a push by big bizness to retract the last few years of progress in the PC/Internet world. It's time for some new ass-kicking innovations to start, rolling in to bust up these lame trends like The Dude's holy bowling ball towards a bunch of lame duck bowling pins of lametardness.

Re:The multi-faceted trends of dumbness

[oodaloop]

It's time for some new ass-kicking innovations to start, rolling in to bust up these lame trends like The Dude's holy bowling ball towards a bunch of lame duck bowling pins of lametardness.

For a second there, I thought you were BanAnalogyGuy.

Re:The multi-faceted trends of dumbness

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't leave these out:
Aspect ratio of LCD screens getting stupid (really wide and short, especially on laptops),
Everything going to the web (I mean really...HTML in a browser has got to be the shittiest interface for interactive efficiency)
"The Cloud" becoming marketing spooge for anything internet-related, whether it makes sense or not

Story of the ages

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"Motherboard? Where did Daddy go?"

"He left us for a much younger, slimmer model."

The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline

[Dcnjoe60]

The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time. Contrast that with a laptop, ultrabook, tablet or phone which are all disposable devices. Most of them, now, you can't even replace the battery, let alone any of the internals. /.ers like car analogies, but I think stereos are a better one. Back in the day, the best stereos were all components. You had an amplifier, a separate tuner, turntable, tape deck, etc. You could purchase the best components your wallet and audio needs dictated. If something new came out, like CDs or a component broke, it didn't require replacing the entire system. That is how it is with desktop computers.

On the other hand the new mobile market devices like tablets and phones are like the mass marketed all in one stereos that started to dominate in the late 70s. They were a marketer's dream, and the accountants loved them, because there were no user serviceable parts inside. If something new came our or something broke, the consumer went out and purchased a new one. Great for the bottom line.

The typical desktop PC can be made to last far longer than its expected useful life (how many computers are still running XP out there?). That is not an option with tablets, phones, ultrabooks and the like. Eventually the battery will fail to hold a charge and since it is not user serviceable, the consumer will have to choose to pay the vendor almost as much to put a new one in or to buy a new device. Easy choice, buy the new device, even if you didn't need the new capabilities. All of those back lit displays also start to dim with time and again are cheaper to replace the device than to send off to have serviced. At least with a desktop, it would involve replacing just the monitor, not the entire computer.

The average consumer convinces themself that the tradeoffs are worth it, but for many of them, they are wrong and they get frustrated and convince themself they just need to upgrade to a better model (Is the iPad X really that much better than the iPad X-1?). The vendors are counting on that! It's all about the marketing.

How many people do you see who would scoff at a $200 netbook, but walk around with a $600 iPad plus keyboard? Both are underpowered, so that can't be it. The iPad does have a touch screen, but is that a $400 advantage, and if so, then why the keyboard? You'll even hear the argument that well, I can leave the keyboard behind and only take it for the times I truly need it -- which is true, but then why do they always have the keyboard with them? Because, they can't admit that a tablet solution wasn't the right solution for their needs and not only did they spend too much, they had to purchase additional pieces to make it work.

Because the average life of the desktop PC can be extended relatively easily and inexpensively, vendors, who depend on ever increasing sales volume as a measure of performance have to switch to a product that allows them to meet that goal, even if it isn't in the best interest of anybody but the shareholders. After all, companies no longer exist primarily to meet a public need, the exist to keep the shareholders happy. If the shareholders are happy, the board is happy. If the board is happy, the executives are happy, etc., etc.

The world has changed and the game is no longer about producing what people need, but instead producing what they will buy, particularly if you can get them to buy it over and over again.

Re:tablets need more storage space and bigger scre

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Whooooooooooooosh!

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[SuricouRaven]

Companies never existed to meet a private need. That is the foundation of a free market society: To achieve a situation in which parties act only in their own best interests, but in doing so incidentially provide a benefit to wider society.

Windows 7 on a Mac Mini??

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting I run Parallels or something like that? Because I don't view what your suggesting as what I want.

My request is perfectly reasonable, yet I can't find it! And you can suggest something a bit smaller with a lower spec running OSX!

What exactly is wrong with wanting a piece of Windows kit that does for Windows software what Android and Arm does for Android software!?

Re:Windows 7 on a Mac Mini??

[h4rr4r]

No, you can install windows 7 directly on a mac mini. Replacing OSX.

Your request is reasonable, but there is no real market for it so it likely does not exist. Anything lower spec is not going to have an i7 you wanted. Unless again you are willing to do the work yourself.

Nothing is wrong with it, get more people interested and it may one day exist.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[SuricouRaven]

Public need, rather. Isn't it annoying when you mistype one word and it completly reverses the meaning?

There's a power cord to my monitor too

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is under the desk because that is where the power is. It could be on the desk behind the monitor if that is where the power was."

No actually it's beside my desk on a stool so I can reach the DVD drive, USB's and connectors. My monitor has a power cord, do you imagine I would put it under the desk for the sake of the power cord? Or just buy a longer power cord!?

My Raid 1 NAS on the other-hand is on my desk in a tiny box, for my backups. (a Zyxel 325). It's an ARM box running 2x3TB drives. Small, quiet, no faffing around.

This is the unhappy situation I find myself in, I decided not to upgrade, instead I stuck some more ram in my existing PC, added a second drive (for space, too late to make it a RAID), and stuck a Raid 1 box for backup on the network.

It means instead of using a new PC for 5 years+, I'll get another 2 yrs out of the existing one, and probably be an early switcher to Android desktops when they inevitably arrive. And yes I expect they'll be fast and small with good disks, maybe even decent SSDs by then when Android desktops finally arrive.

I find you comments depressing. Like an old man telling me his gramophone makes more natural sounds than a CD, even though it makes all hiss and scratch sounds and is clumsy and unreliable, he clings to it. Only this old man represents all the companies making music players, and not one of them is making one of those new fangled CD players. Instead they've released the latest 'crystal pickup' for super-sound HiFi and can't figure out why they're losing market to new companies!

Does you fan still spin at 72rpm? Yes, I'm being sarky, but really, my request was perfectly sensible yet nobody can point me to a PC that does it!

Re:There's a power cord to my monitor too

[h4rr4r]

My Workstation ATX case is tall enough I don't need to put it on a stand to reach ports and disk drives. A monitor has to be visible, the case does not.

I should take your silly claims as insults and leave you without any assistance. I am sadly a better person than that and will instead try to help you find what you are looking for.

The following should be quite close, you may need to select a different model on that website.

http://us.shuttle.com/ConfigurePackage.aspx?package=74GSH61R4-001-SCG-001

My computer case has had the fans upgraded, since it did not come with fans and actually does hold a RAID array of SSDs. So a sight more modern than yours. You may claim that little raid box is no faffing about. Until it dies and you can't read those disks. Using linux software raid I can just move the drives to a new machine. It outperforms hardware Raid unless you are spending thousands on the controller as well. I know I tested it vs such controllers I have at work.

Parent Nailed it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I was going to say.

The cheap ride is over for the nerds. We won't buy and build in the future like we have been able to; in a way, it is a dark future. CONSUMER computers will go mainstream and real general purpose computers will be an expensive niche. The dream that everybody would know something about computers because they are everywhere is dead, consumers will understand computer technology less than they do their combustion powered cars. The GUI metaphors we have now tend to represent the tech but this iOS consumer computer revolution has started the next phase of technology abstraction. Even Apple's desktop OS has begun to phase out saving files and Ubuntu and Apple are encouraging people to search rather than navigate. I won't be surprised if house thermostats change to "warmer"(a sun icon) and "colder" (snowflake) instead of using degrees... with iPhone control.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[Dcnjoe60]

Companies never existed to meet a private need. That is the foundation of a free market society: To achieve a situation in which parties act only in their own best interests, but in doing so incidentially provide a benefit to wider society.

Actually Capitalism and the whole concept of supply and demand is predicated on meeting the public (not private) need. Until recent times, if the public didn't need something, the public didn't purchase it and the demand was low. As such, nobody sold it or sold it so low that it wasn't profitable. Think of buggy whips, once the automobile was established.

The other extreme is an economy based on a centralized group (usually the government) determining what will be produced. There the goods are sold, not because of public need, but because there are no other alternatives. If you need a hammer, but all the government produces are wrenches, you buy a wrench to use as a hammer.

What has changed in the past century, is the amount of disposable income the average person has (in the US). This means that not just needs can be met, but so can wants. Consumerism has become rampant and because of easy credit, until recently, it has been a successful strategy for businesses. However, now that consumers cannot deficit spend as readily, the more traditional supply and demand curves re-establish them self and needs are met first. That is one of the reasons of the cash for clunkers program. To encourage people to purchase new vehicles that they had decided they didn't "need", the government had to sweeten the pot to entice them to make the purchase.

When it comes to desktop computers, since most people don't "need" to upgrade regularly, there isn't a long-term money stream for the manufacturers. Therefore, they have to convince you to buy something else, ie. tablets. Tablets do have a long term money stream, because they are basically manufactured to be disposable devices. Of course, you don't have the government to step in like they did in the cash for clunkers program to entice people to purchase them, so what do you do? You shift to producing tablets (and associated components) like Intel has done and then you quit making the competing product -- the desktop. Why? Because, even if people still "need" it, you force them into your new product line, one which is better for your bottom line.

This thread started with the notion of Intel being a monopoly and why would they do something like this? It is precisely because the are a monopoly in the desktop market that they can do something like this.

Make a laptop I want to buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they'd get a sale from me if OEMs would remember how to make computers. I'd really like to stop using my Pentium M-based laptop, but laptops these days have regressed in usability and ergonomics:

- Screens these days are reflective or "anti-glare", the latter of which is full of glare compared to matte.

- Phones have better resolutions than most laptops.

- Laptops with screens 15" or larger have number pads incorporated into their keyboards, which requires me either to type off-center or look at the screen crooked.

I will not buy a computer that hampers my ability to get work done or possibly make me more vulnerable to RSI.

They've been slowly doing it for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2008, all of Intel's "Desktop Board" line were physically manufactured by third parties, and half of the line was designed by third parties. By 2010, 3/4 of the line were designed by third parties. I don't know about now, but it wouldn't surprise me if the entire line are third-party designed-and-manufactured now. So it would just be Intel taking their name off, and stopping BIOS customization.

Re:tablets need more storage space and bigger scre

[Anonymous Coward]

you really thought he was being sarcastic? i mean, it's possible, but judging from his whole post i don't see why you'd construe any of that as sarcasm.

if it is, okay, he got me. good job on including absolutely nothing funny or clever or even resembling sarcasm, and calling it sarcasm. man, i'm SO dumb. whoosh indeed.

Yeh, I looked at these

[Anonymous Coward]

I considered these, basically Nettops, low to medium speed, no Raid, graphics card is probably good enough for now, but who knows what 5 years will bring. Not even close. Often no optical drive, sometimes no card readers.

At the other end, when I priced an i7 HP desktop, for $1300 they didn't even give me a RAID!! All the money was for the i7 and Windows 8, and the rest of the hardware could have been a $200 Chinese craptastic desktop.

And huge too, it seems as you went up in spec, you went up in size. Smaller is surely better!? Why provide a bigger case with more wasted space? Yet that's what they do!

Anyway, I've said my piece, I think they're missing an opportunity, but believe they'll be history soon enough anyway.

Re:Yeh, I looked at these

[hurfy]

I considered these, basically Nettops, low to medium speed, no Raid, graphics card is probably good enough for now, but who knows what 5 years will bring. Not even close. Often no optical drive, sometimes no card readers.

At the other end, when I priced an i7 HP desktop, for $1300 they didn't even give me a RAID!! All the money was for the i7 and Windows 8, and the rest of the hardware could have been a $200 Chinese craptastic desktop.

And huge too, it seems as you went up in spec, you went up in size. Smaller is surely better!? Why provide a bigger case with more wasted space? Yet that's what they do!

Anyway, I've said my piece, I think they're missing an opportunity, but believe they'll be history soon enough anyway.

lol, my gaming computer came with a nice processor, a mid-range GPU, a bunch of RAM....and an itty bitty (cheap) MB in a HUGE case. In fact tonight project is to start the transfer to my (prettier) desktop case. Wasted space is an understatement on mine, there is only one slot on MB but like 5-6 holes in the case. There is literally NOTHING in 9 inches of the case. Yup, gave in and bought premade this time as the price was the same for components or system. I'd have bought a better MB and no case but the premade meant it cost like $5 to have them assemble and install Windows and if something is broke i know who to yell at ;)

You'll still have it; you'll just pay more

[Cajun Hell]

I really need my high-end desktop computer to do my job. How long until something will happen to this market segment will disappear as well?

Nobody is saying that it will disappear. What they're predicting is that this segment will get smaller. And because of that, some manufacturers will pull out.

We have been lucky over the last two or three decades (especially the last two) in that everyone (Joe Schmoe) needs a computer much like yours and mine. The resulting economy-of-scale allowed many manufacturers to participate, and caused prices to plummet, so that where as a "good" computer used to cost $3000, today it costs around $800 (give or take, depending on how you define "good").

In the future, though, they're saying Joe Schmoe isn't going to buy a computer like yours and mine. He's going to buy something totally different. When someone makes a new low-power ARM-based board which serves Joe's market, you and I get little or nothing in scale-coattail-riding. The manufacturers that we buy from, aren't getting a piece of Joe's action.

So your future "good" computer might cost $1600 instead of $800, your "kick-ass" computer will cost $4000 instead of the $2000 that it costs today, and your "super-kickass" computer will cost .. well, actually that one won't change much because we already don't get much economy-of-scale from Joe since he never buys SMP boxes anyway. It'll be back-to-the-80s, in that your machine will identify you as being a niche user. Someone will see your bedroom or desk and immediately think "nerd." Just like they did in 1983, but didn't in 1993 or 2003, years when your computer was like everyone else's, if I may overgeneralize a little.

Just one thing...

[Corwn of Amber]

If desktop computers just go away, how will we develop the apps for those half-baked non-self-contained computers? It's not like you can run Eclipse on Android, or XCode on iOS.

Re:Just one thing...

[Marcion]

Exactly, when the hype dies down, everyone will go back to their keyboards connected to static desktops.

However, I actually do run Emacs on my Samsung S3 using a small bluetooth keyboard. Nothing wrong with the form factor if you stick to a resonable line width (e.g. 80 characters). The port however to Android is immature and sometimes dies because Android does not provide all the shared libraries a normal Linux distro would, however, once they get that sorted out it will be better. You still have to prop the phone up somehow though which is not always simple.

Re:Just one thing...

[TwentyCharsIsNotEnou]

Desktops won't go away, they'll just become a more niche product, and thus more expensive.

It could happen very quickly though, as it will act like a positive feedback loop - with prices going up, fewer home users / enthusiasts will buy them, thus they'll get even more expensive.....

Overkill

[ThatsNotPudding]

Fact is, most pedestrian users have realized they don't need a machine that could crunch FEA or render an entire building when all they will ever do is email and surf. No longer needing a dedicated desk big enough for a keyboard, mouse and chair (or not having the space to begin with) has also been a big factor; get a laptop or tablet and have a seat on the far-comfier couch.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[Anonymous Coward]

Which blithely ignores the fact that most of the PC market never "upgrades" anything except perhaps memory.

My company purchases these cheapass HP tower PCs for ~$300 each. They have three drivebays and three expansion slots. Huge wasteful powersupply. They will never be upgraded, the expansion slots will never be used, they will never get an additional drive installed.

WHY is an overkil tower the cheapest corporate PC option? Only because the PC market is a fucked-up dinosaur, completely stuck it's ways.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[SillyHamster]

The world has changed and the game is no longer about producing what people need, but instead producing what they will buy, particularly if you can get them to buy it over and over again.

No one needs a computer. Or a house with plumbing, or a car, or a meaty diet.

Economies have always been about producing what people want, and interestingly people have been and are still willing to pay a lot for fashion and status. (4-5 figures for a handbag? For a dress with practically no fabric? Heh.)

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[Bodero]

The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time. Contrast that with a laptop, ultrabook, tablet or phone which are all disposable devices.

Well, no kidding. I know you didn't mean for this, but rather meant for an anti-corporate screed, but did you ever think that you are several years into this "decline," and the reason for the decline is exactly what you said? That is, the desktops people currently own have been made to last a very long time, thus don't need to be upgraded, and therefore, the desktop market has declined?

It's not because of "corporate desires" or "evil shareholders," it's because a desktop from 2009, for nearly all casual users of computers, works just as fine as one built today.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[SuricouRaven]

Supply and demand does meet the public need. What I meant is that it doesn't depend on altuism. No manufacturer needs to think 'There's a hammer shortage, I'd better make some more before we have a crisis on our hands.' All the manufacturer does is seek to maximise their own profit, entirely selfishly and greedily. They don't care about the public good - but the laws of supply and demand serve to focus them indirectly into providing the goods and services society needs, because that is where the money is to be made.

There are some things which subvert this model effectively, though. Advertising, for example, is able to effectively convince people to buy products they don't need or even really want.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[kwerle]

The real reason the desktop pc is on the decline is that it can be upgraded and made to last a very long time...

Nope. Nobody (you 3 geeks don't count) upgrades their PC - they buy a new one if they need to. The reason people are not buying new ones is that PCs from several years ago still do everything that users need 'em to do. ei. email, light text, light surfing, photo management, media playback.

That power curve is going to hit phones and pads in the next few years, hard, and the compelling reason to upgrade your phone/pad will be battery life (if we can manage to pull off some good battery technology improvements and/or power management/use improvements).

One item limits uptake of another.

[Binary Ninja]

Sometimes the unavailability of one item limits the uptake of the other. When Pentiums first started shipping, there were relatively few motherboards available for them. (Compared to the 386 stuff.) I can't verify the statement, but something like 90% of the Pentium chips were going onto Intel boards.

Availability of mice had a similar limiting affect on uptake of Windows. Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.

If desktop boards are no longer strategic for Intel, I can see why they'd want to focus their energies elsewhere.

Re:One item limits uptake of another.

[RockDoctor]

Availability of mice had a similar limiting affect on uptake of Windows. Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.

Bollocks.

I was around at the time, including learning how to build and repair industrial and desktop computers "in the field" (i.e. out at sea, where spare parts are several days the other side of "your company is fired"). There was no shortage of mice, pen-graphics tablet combinations, trackballs and touch screens at the time. There was a shortage of good, robust versions of all of the above, but even that wasn't the limiting factor to the uptake of Windows. The two biggest limiting factors were :
(1) there were several alternatives to Windows for a multi-application task-switching environment - GEM and DESQview being best known [DESQview was still running industrial systems in 2002 : I sledge-hammered our last system, while it was powered up and working, because we were losing money and personnel being in that particular game] ; and
(2) the most important factor was that early versions of Windows were absolutely crap. It wasn't until Windows 3 (and considerably better, Windows 3.11) that their environmental lead started to reach snowballing levels. That was 1990 or so, and I finally upgraded from DrDOS and GEM on my 1989 machine to Windows 3.11 in mid 1993. That machine couldn't quite handle WinNT4 in 1998, so in a way it was nice of the burglars to take it then.

Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.

Actually, though I consider Gates and his fawning minions to be the scum of the universe, I do have to admit the MS-mice have generally been pretty good products. Though whether they're worth 6 times the cost of a budget mouse is a different question.

Everything is moving to mobile???

[atomicxblue]

This is very short sighted and doubtful many business owners are willing to shell out the money for smartphones and tablets so people can enter data into spreadsheets on screens the size of your hand.

If hardware manufacturers stop making PC parts, the death of the PC will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[ducomputergeek]

I guess I should hand in my geek card now because I no longer see the need in having a computer in the house. I don't even have a laptop anymore. I have an iMac at the office. At home I have my iPad and an iPhone. First iPad I had I got the keyboard case. I found it was handy in a pinch, but not that often. When I got my latest iPad I just got a case that protects the screen and a docking station for my house. At the office, I'm going to use the iMac. At home, I do need to write an occasional long personal email, so having the full sized keyboard is nice there. I use the device to read, watch netflix & hulu, check facebook, watch youtube, and email. For work meetings the iPad with a stylus pen takes notes just fine for me and it a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop.

It's the software, stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Complexity sucks.

Managing complexity is what information science is about. Most people aren't information scientists; when they want a tool that extends their reach and is a seamless extension of them (their will), they don't want complex and fragile use cases. They want a hammer which will nail their boards, not an assistant focused on getting them to not deal with the task at hand most of the time with extra details and tasks extraneous to the main goal.

Personally, there are only so many hours a week. I've spent a lot of time educating myself and gaining experience in areas of my prime interests and other areas. In my case, information technology and information science are the things I've focused on, but that's not true of everyone. And even in my case, where I'm a person who knows what I know, I'd rather that when I set out to do accomplish a task, I not get too side-tracked with side-quests. If I want to game on the iPad, I load the game and play. If I want to game on a Windows PC, well, there's a lot around that. I work full-time; I don't have time to waste on Windows' (and Microsoft's) problems with the world.

That is why devices which are seamless extensions of a person's will are doing better in general markets than the same devices which require a specialization of interest and additional time investment in a specialization. It seems obvious to me, but clearly it's not obvious to everyone.

Notice how much more programming became accessible once we stopped toggling in binary code directly, but instead added a symbolic assembler on top to transform our program text. Now think about functional programming, procedural programming, object-oriented programming, or the logic-derived languages.

Notice how much more programming became useful from there when we introduced other abstracts that *hid the lower level's complexity* while *yielding a useful interface for the desired use*.

A good tool takes care of extraneous details so you can focus on the task at hand. The iPad is that for people who aren't willing to put up with the Aspergers experience known as Windows.

Was dissapointed in Intel MB.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first and only experience that I had with Intel Motherboards was an expensive high end motherboard on a custom build. While I can't complain about the parts quality, it cannot suspend-to-ram under Linux, and in all the years since, they never fixed the Bios. Ever since then I wish I had gone with another company.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[luther349]

that's all well and good i guess but tablets are not desktop replacements yet. wile getting better they are still low power devices and probably always will be because your not going to get 10 hrs battery life something packing 16gb of ram and a gtx 660. netbooks got replaced as a low power pc due to there tec stalling due to Microsoft and Intel kept shipping with atoms crippled with really bad gma gpus. the few amd apu models walked all over any other netbook but few where made. tablets took over the handheld market that for sure and nivida is looking to cash in on that with there new tegra 4 android powered handheld.

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[not flu]

Disclaimer: I have never seen anybody use a tablet with a keyboard. I don't own one nor do I expect to get one in the foreseeable future.

The (retina) iPad's screen is easily more than 3x as good as that on any netbook I've seen (and in fact better than any PC laptop), even a good phone has better resolution, color and viewing angles. If they sold them as computer monitors I would buy one. If we weren't stuck in the dark ages of fullHD TN panels I'm sure there would be more demand for computing power on desktops, too, but what good will it all do if your photos, websites and games won't look any better? If you can't even have a whole page of a book shown on-screen at once without the text being rendered at such low res as to make it genuinely difficult to read? There are diminishing returns on computing power when your user interface devices are the limiting factor.

I think part of the success of tablets has to do with how advances on traditional PCs have been made too difficult. Windows isn't resolution independent. Netbooks were intentionally marginalized. Outside linux-style package managers you still had to hunt your software down one-by-one from all over the internet until Apple's App Store. The trends for easier and more mobile computers have been apparent for decades. Perhaps "general use" computers aren't all that general use after all if they can't keep up?

Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin

[Dcnjoe60]

I guess I should hand in my geek card now because I no longer see the need in having a computer in the house. I don't even have a laptop anymore. I have an iMac at the office. At home I have my iPad and an iPhone. First iPad I had I got the keyboard case. I found it was handy in a pinch, but not that often. When I got my latest iPad I just got a case that protects the screen and a docking station for my house. At the office, I'm going to use the iMac. At home, I do need to write an occasional long personal email, so having the full sized keyboard is nice there. I use the device to read, watch netflix & hulu, check facebook, watch youtube, and email. For work meetings the iPad with a stylus pen takes notes just fine for me and it a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop.

Why hand in your geek card? But from your use description, you don't need a full fledged computer at home and possibly not at the office, either. As such, an iPad seems a good choice. On the other hand, your use case is not everybody's use case.

I do not want to be a mobile user always

[Anonymous Coward]

It still sounds like very bad news for the PC people... AGAIN, justified under middle management managers (no economists please) decisioning for **the market** and **the markets** and **commercial reasons**. Should their providers go through anything, from a tsunami to a mass revolt in the dining room or... I do hope that DESKTOP PCS be kept in production while computing lasts in the Human species, which actually should be awhile we can incorporate it in our DNA _CODE_. ...