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Intel's Upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs Won't Work With Today's Motherboards (pcworld.com)

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs won't work with existing 200-series motherboards that support Kaby Lake, a manufacturer confirmed on Wednesday. In a Twitter post by Asrock last Saturday, the company confirmed the news when asked if "the Z270 Supercarrier [will] get support for the upcoming @intel Coffee Lake CPUs." Their response: "No, Coffee Lake CPU is not compatible with 200-series motherboards." PCWorld reports: According to at least one reliable source outside of Intel, the new Coffee Lake CPU will indeed not be compatible with Z270 boards, even though the chipsets with the upcoming Z370 appear to be the same, PCWorld was told. The source added that there are hopes in the industry that Intel will change its mind on compatibility. Tomshardware.com said it had independently confirmed the news with Asrock officials as well.

Why this matters: The vast majority of new CPU sales are in new systems, and they likely won't be impacted by the incompatibility. However, there's also a very large and very vocal crowd of builders and upgraders who still swap out older, slower CPUs for newer, faster CPUs to maximize their investment. An upgrade-in-place doesn't sell an Intel chipset, but it at least keeps them on the Intel platform. If consumers are forced to dump an existing Z270 motherboard for a newer Z370 to get a six-core Coffee Lake CPU, Intel risks driving them into the arms of AMD and its Ryzen CPUs.

240 comments

  1. They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just not 'officially' or 'supported'.

    1. Re:They probably will work. by Xenx · · Score: 3, Funny

      They're saying not compatible. What this likely means is a change in pin layout.

    2. Re:They probably will work. by Lirodon · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually no, this is probably a sign that a new socket is on the way. This is not news, as Intel has been doing this exact pattern for a while now; Intel will keep a single socket compatible for at least two Core generations before replacing it and breaking compatibility. Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge (1155). Haswell, Broadwell (1150), Skylake, Kaby Lake (1151).

    3. Re:They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes it is known that intel usually changes their sockets, the problem they have now is AMD has finally stepped up to the plate with a competitive if not better product.

      If enthusiasts are going to have to replace their motherboard to jump onto intel's latest and greatest you can guarantee that enthusiasts will give AMD a good look over, since they are having to sink money into a whole new motherboard platform no matter which side they go with.

      With this new competition Intel would have probably been better off to stick with the same socket for at least one more generation, that way they could capture the market that doesn't want to buy a whole new motherboard.

      They have basically given enthusiasts a reason to look at the competition rather than just dropping in a new CPU upgrade.

    4. Re:They probably will work. by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      if it's a different socket, okay.

      but " Z270 boards, even though the chipsets with the upcoming Z370 appear to be the same" .. that matters a few years down the line when you're building a kit from some parts. if the socket is different then it's not that much of a problem.

      a more interesting thing would be just.. is it faster in any sort of meaningful way?

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:They probably will work. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      They have basically given enthusiasts a reason to look at the competition rather than just dropping in a new CPU upgrade.

      Why should Intel care? How many people replace the CPU on their motherboard? Is this even 1% of the market?

    6. Re:They probably will work. by JDeane · · Score: 2

      I do and had built my Skylake with the intention of buying a better CPU down the road, I am an Intel guy through and through but AMD has my attention and might have my next purchase.

    7. Re:They probably will work. by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Also... "Coffee Lake"? What were they drinking when they came up with... oh. Right.

    8. Re: They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Realistically people like you are such an infintesimally small segment of the market that they just won't care.

    9. Re:They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They are building up toward cofefe lake.

    10. Re:They probably will work. by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why should Intel care? How many people replace the CPU on their motherboard? Is this even 1% of the market?

      Intel should care not because of the home builders. Intel should care because of the big box builders.

      Those older motherboards have come down in price over their period of compatibility, meaning that even big name system builders could offer lower prices.

      ..'cept now they can't... they have to RAISE their prices in order to screw down these latest more expensive motherboards.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    11. Re:They probably will work. by link-error · · Score: 1

      It's not the the home builder, it's the 'buzz' it creates. If these CPU's work that well, the builders will tell their friends and family to go to BestBuy and pick up a Ryzen. I basically tell all of my extended family what to purchase if not actually build it for them.

      --
      -Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
    12. Re:They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In the past it was justified by new features, but Coffee Lake is another Optimization/Refresh lineup. It's just another move by Intel to force the idiots in their fanbase to fork some more cash needlessly buying meaningless improvements.

    13. Re: They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Realistically people like you are such an infintesimally small segment of the market that they just won't care.

      If the CPUs were compatible, computer stores could advertise upgrades; would be a 5 min job for a bench tech.

    14. Re:They probably will work. by apoc.famine · · Score: 2

      "The Builders". How many of us do you think there are? Probably 99%+ of sales are people going to Dell.com or BestBuy and picking something off the shelf. (Well, these days the Apple store, I guess, which further negates processor choice.) I doubt that very many people know the difference between Intel or AMD, other than the fact that Intel advertises, so the name might be vaguely familiar. FFS, I bet not many people actually understand the difference between Intel and IBM for that matter. "They're both computer companies."
       
      And "the builders" are probably dropping in number pretty quickly, as well. I used to upgrade a machine every year or so for about two decades, but I haven't done that in the last 3 years. 3 year old hardware is good enough for just about everything these days. The days of exponential progress every year seem long over. My primary machine is also a laptop, and they're just not worth the hassle to try and build. The massive time-sink to build a laptop isn't worth the upcharge for having someone build it for me.

      --
      Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
    15. Re:They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think that made a lot of economic sense unless you were quite cash-limited and chose the very cheapest, low-end CPU (so that you didn't lose much money it ended up sitting in a closet forever after you replaced it).

    16. Re:They probably will work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If enthusiasts are going to have to replace their motherboard to jump onto intel's latest and greatest you can guarantee that enthusiasts will give AMD a good look over, since they are having to sink money into a whole new motherboard platform no matter which side they go with.

      I think if an enthusiast is so desperately disappointed with Kaby Lake that they're already looking to upgrade, then they were going to give AMD a good look over anyway. (And I think we are bending over backwards to be incredibly nice to these people by calling them "enthusiasts" instead of something more clinical.)

      If they're upgrading from something older (i.e. sufficiently slower where an upgrade might actually possibly make sense) then they were going to upgrade mobo anyway, for faster RAM, more PCIE lanes, etc.

    17. Re: They probably will work. by KGIII · · Score: 1

      How much of the market is the enthusiast market? If it isn't large, Intel could just ignore them.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    18. Re:They probably will work. by slew · · Score: 1

      Also... "Coffee Lake"? What were they drinking when they came up with... oh. Right.

      On the lake?

      Interesting they seemed to pick a name corresponding to a dried up barren lake bed... Maybe there's probably some sort of subtle subconscious thing going on there...

  2. Why is this news? by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Intel, for as long as I remember, needlessly changed sockets.

    1. Re:Why is this news? by cheesybagel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No shit. They do this *all* the time.

    2. Re: Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Because Ryzen. It's right there in TFS.

    3. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They did not "needessly" change sockets!
      They did it because fuck the customer for profits, is why.

      -Capitalism

    4. Re:Why is this news? by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      that, and to do things like introduce the Core "i" series with GPU (775 -> 1156), shits and giggles (1156 -> 1155), add integrated voltage regulators in to chips (1155 -> 1150), switch from DDR3 to DDR4 (1150 -> 1151)

    5. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This. They illegally drive sales of new motherboards with their monopoly.

    6. Re: Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are correct. Even DEC Alpha CPUs that were cutting edge didn't require me motherboards nearly as quickly.

    7. Re: Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Correct. Intel keeps making meaningless changes.

    8. Re: Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      who cares about ryzen? yeah yeah i know, ryzen is sooooooooooooo much better than intel. maybe it is, maybe it isn't. this is about intel and their shitty socket practices.

    9. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This. They illegally drive sales of new motherboards with their monopoly.

      Given that there are two players in that exact market, you cannot say "monopoly".
      Well, you can say it, it's just that you're wrong.

      Also, it's not illegal, so even though you can say that too, you're still wrong.

    10. Re:Why is this news? by jaklode · · Score: 1

      No no, they do have a monopoly on chipsets for Intel CPUs.

    11. Re:Why is this news? by Misagon · · Score: 1

      Because it is a "bait and switch" situation.

      Intel had previously announced that Coffee Lake would use the 1151 socket, and so people assumed that that meant compatibility with previous motherboards that have that socket.
      I would bet that there are quite a few consumers out there who had got 1151 socket motherboards and a 4-cores or less CPU (which is all that is available) with the intention to upgrade to a Coffee Lake 6-core CPU in the future.

      Right now, even a 2-core CPU with high clock is considered a good choice for games because current games performance don't scale proportionally to more cores.
      Future games (and patches) are expected to be able to use more cores more effectively.

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    12. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed.

      Intel and AMD have no desire to work together on "socket compatible" processors like they did some 20+ years ago. These 2 "market giants" have the influence (or leverage, depending on how you see it) to get motherboard manufacturers to built "Intel specific" and "AMD specific" boards which effectively cuts out any other CPU competition. Remember Cyrix? Remember Evergreen? Remember any other "socket compatible" CPUs from those old old days? I doubt that you do.

      I guess Intel and AMD see different sockets and different pin counts as some strange type of "product differentiator" or something. Even AMD has gotten on the frequent CPU socket switching bandwagon as there was AM2, then AM2+, then AM3, then AM3+, then AM1 (first APUs), then ??, and now a socket just for Ryzen.

      Does Intel or AMD "respect the customer"? Nope. They just see the customer, whether it be "server class" or "desktop class", as nothing more than an ATM from which they regularly withdraw cash for their bloated bottom lines.

    13. Re:Why is this news? by gfxguy · · Score: 1

      I don't see the big deal.... everybody whines and complains when compatibility is broken. People still think Windows 3 programs should still run under Windows 10, and that MS made it that way to force people to upgrade other software. It's not like they added any new features to the OS that forced them to finally let go of backwards compatibility. People here are right - those most affected here are a tiny fraction of the population, and most of them will just upgrade their MBs next time they want to upgrade.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    14. Re:Why is this news? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      Was going to say - anyone remember the "Slot 1" debacle? And then after that turned out to suck and cause significant challenges, back to ZIF sockets halfway through the Pentium-3 products. They didn't even wait for a new architecture.

      How is this news? They've literally been doing this for longer than 15 years.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    15. Re: Why is this news? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      And AMD was sticking with Socket-7 after Intel started using various different sockets and slots because reasons almost two decades ago. How is this news, again?

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    16. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which is not a thing that violates antitrust law. This is the same mistake by people saying "but but but Apple has a monopoly on app store purchases for iOS!"

      The law doesn't segment the market for purposes of antitrust law - they would look at "motherboard chipsets" instead of looking at "motherboard chipsets for Intel CPUs"

    17. Re:Why is this news? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      It's not bait-and-switch if new information invalidates people's incorrect assumptions that are based on zero relevant information from the manufacturers. Anyone who purchased a motherboard that didn't explicitly state compatibility with the upcoming "Coffee Lake" and expected compatibility was taking a gamble, and is personally liable for the result of that gamble.

      It's bait-and-switch if Intel advertised that the new CPU would work in Kaby Lake motherboards, and then it didn't work. They didn't do that, and I'll bet real money that exactly zero motherboard manufacturers did that either.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    18. Re:Why is this news? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Intel, for as long as I remember, needlessly changed sockets.

      Goes back to the 90s when Pentium was first introduced: Pentium sockets were nothing like Pentium Pro or II or III or 4. AMD would try and leverage the existing infrastructure by designing CPUs that were drops-in to Pentium sockets, but Intel created everything from scratch.

      Having said that, though, today's CPUs - if one wants to upgrade them, one has to closely match them w/ the chipset & everything else, or suffer a performance hit. Anyone who wants to upgrade won't notice a performance boost: that's more likely to come w/ more multi-processed and multi-threaded applications. And that's where having CPUs w/ more cores might come in handy, but typically, 4 is the sweet spot before one starts seeing diminishing returns

    19. Re:Why is this news? by dunkelfalke · · Score: 1

      Take socket 2011. There are actually several electrically incompatible versions of that for no good reason.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
    20. Re: Why is this news? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      That's probably b'cos supporting chipsets didn't come even close to 200+MHz CPUs, so they probably had frequency dividers b/w CPU and chipset that took care of this particular issue

    21. Re:Why is this news? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      So are ALi, Via and SiS out of the chipset market?

    22. Re:Why is this news? by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "Which is not a thing that violates antitrust law."

      But could actually violate Magnusson-Moss anti-tying provisions.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    23. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And for as long as I remember, a Coffee Lake in a CPU socket of any description has never had a good outcome. Intel marketing is going to have to put in a lot of overtime on this one.

    24. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea this is dumb. I can't remember the last time I only upgraded the CPU without at lest a new MoBo if not new ram as well.

    25. Re:Why is this news? by slew · · Score: 1

      So are ALi, Via and SiS out of the chipset market?

      Yes. Everyone is out of the chipset market. Since Lynnfield/Clarksfield introduced in 2009, Intel integrated their northbridge and moved to their proprietary DMI (aka direct media interconnect) for their southbridge, so there are no alternative Intel chipset vendors. That's coming up on a decade ago...

      AFAIK, Nvidia was the last alternative intel chipset supplier with their MCP89 in the 2010 version of the Macbook Air...

    26. Re: Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And at that time we had a socket 7 motherboard that lacked split planes voltage, so we upgraded to a used Intel P166 non MMX. It was a good deal.
      I later got a whole different socket 7 motherboard plus PSU and case, with K6/2 CPU. Had 100MHz FSB and more than one SDRAM slot, perhaps even two USB 1.1 on the back though I never used them :). And ATX instead of AT.

      It was also just before we got Internet, since dial up was either very expensive or 20 hours a month the vast majority of people waited for DSL to get Internet.

    27. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't see the big deal

      The big deal is avoiding a situation like: "Oh, you want to plug in that USB 4 Device? Well you'll need to run out and buy a new computer." Or "The next windows forced update requires a new computer. Your current one will stop working in 3 days. See you in the checkout line!"

      Remember, this is the industry that's been moving toward CaaS (Computers as a Service) A.K.A. rent-seeking for years now. Given their way, you'll eventually be paying for a computer subscription, on top of your internet subscription, on top of your Windows and Office365 subscription, on top of your Autodesk / Adobe Subscriptions. ad-nauseam.

      Why have they been doing this? Because most people don't need the latest and greatest computer to get their day to day tasks done anymore and haven't for years. There also hasn't been big enough developments in hardware to push new sales to the masses. (The biggest boost was the VR thing last year, but that's not marketable to the average person yet. Not to mention they need to solve the virtual legs problem for that to really take off. (Of course having something worth while to sell the platform with would also be a suggestion.)) No, a small chipset modification isn't marketable to consumers unless they can detect some enhancement with little effort, (Usability, performance.) and the last thing on that front was smartphones. (Which are starting to hit the same wall as PCs.)

      To get people to buy anyway, the industry has been resorting to trick after trick to prop up sales.
        - Forced updates to prevent hold outs under the guise of security.
        - Subscription plans to ensure their revenue stream despite the lack of innovation.
        - Bloated unnecessary frameworks and features that make older systems unable to function efficiently to encourage upgrades / replacements.
        - Online storage to ease the constant upgrade process (and to add a another revenue stream by scraping that info and selling it to advertisers.)
        - Placing limits on the device owner / administrator to reduce their influence over the machine itself. (Locked bootloaders, lack of documentation, lack of options / GPOs, management systems that have to be run (or blessed) by the manufacturer, integrated on chipset rootkits, etc.)

      The industry has been in trouble for awhile now. Short of a sudden major hardware advancement or new usage development, they have very little to justify new sales. In an industry that's been said to make major advancements every 6 months. So it's not surprising to see that in the realm of Capitalism, rather than accept that they need to retool for maintenance of existing systems with the occasional replacement, they've resorted to making everything a rental to artificially prop up their dying business model.

      That's the big deal here, you keep up that attitude, "Who cares? Pay your rental fee." That's exactly what you will get, and what others don't want.

    28. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually you can run your Windows 3.0 programs in Windows 10, if you go for the 32bit version of the OS.
      For DOS only console/text mode programs work.

      Windows 7 didn't let you make the cmd.exe prompt full screen. Maybe I could live with DOS games not working natively, but with this, the huge bloat and all the retarded GUI changes ('show desktop' on the right and you're not allowed to move it, color schemes removed from the classic GUI, etc.) I just ended up going to linux.

    29. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ALi became ULi and got bought by nvidia. As I've just said in another post there's a geforce 7025 survivance, we're at the tail end of it.

      VIA has never stopped its business either, but uses its chipsets with its own VIA x86 CPUs only. Along the x86 license they kept the rights to the Pentium 4 / Core 2 Duo front side bus technology which they used on Nano X2 and Nano X4 and their chipset.
      I once seen it described as a prestige business for a Taiwanese billionaire. I also seen very underreported news about new VIA CPUs and so that might be a possible alternative non-Intel and non-AMD platform.

      Lastly, Vortex86DX3 is a 32bit PC-compatible SoC with Rise and SiS heritage. Lower end and lower power than VIA :)

    30. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We had the same situation previously with Kaby Lake and "Haswell Refresh" and the new chipsets were not really needed at all.

      If Coffee Lake really is incompatible, this will break this pattern and we'll have reason to be enraged.

      _On the other hand_ the incompatibility of Kaby Lake and Haswell Refresh and Broadwell-K with "older" motherboards were real! But they affect builders of new systems more than upgraders.
      How it goes : Z170 motherboards support Skylake, Z270 motherboards support Kaby Lake. If you plug a Kaby Lake into a Skylake motherboard it won't even make it into POST and UEFI set up.
      BUT if you update the BIOS/UEFI/firmware of an Z170 motherboard, Kaby Lake CPU will work perfectly.

      This will be easy enough for an upgrader, if they're aware of the need for a firmware update.
      For someone who buys a Z170 (or H110, B150) motherboard and Kaby Lake CPU, the motherboard will be from an older inventory (unless it is a newer H110 motherboard) and the PC won't boot. For this there are several solutions : buy a Celeron (but you might want to know the G3930 is Kaby Lake), borrow a CPU, have a 3rd party flash the motherboard for you (this can even be a service offered by an online store that sells you the motherboard, at a cost), or some particular motherboards allow to flash the BIOS without a CPU present.

      Substitute Z370 and Coffee Lake instead of Z270 and Kaby Lake, then this might be the exact same story and with suitable BIOS upgrade Coffee Lake might work with Z170.

      tl;dr Intel might be doing "Cover your ass" with this announcement and it wouldn't be the first time. Semi justified if you have an OEM system with no firmware update released, or if you buy an older new motherboard with the new CPU.
      On another note they've pretended socket 1366 motherboard support 4GB RAM sticks and 24GB RAM max, but they support 8GB sticks and 48GB RAM max. In the same way socket 1156 supports 32GB not 16GB. Same things with e.g. a smartphone that supports "up to" 128GB SD card but bigger SD cards actually work, they were just not tested and maybe it will take a 2TB card when/if available.

    31. Re:Why is this news? by tbq · · Score: 1

      The difference is that most of the AMD sockets in the last 10 years are somewhat compatible with each other with a BIOS update, although some of the feature sets aren't necessarily available. An AM2 CPU will work in an AM2+ motherboard and an AM2+ CPU will work in an AM2 motherboard. AM3 CPUs could also work on an AM2+ motherboard, but neither AM2 or AM2+ CPUs would work on an AM3 motherboard. AM3 and AM3+ CPUs and motherboards are also compatible with each other while FM2 CPUs will also work in FM2+ motherboards.

      AMD did make the socket 754 series which didn't have any compatibility or upgrade path with the socket A series before it or the socket 939 series after it, so they too have screwed desktop owners out of upgrade paths before.

    32. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Worst was the several generations of socket 775 motherboards. Backwards compatible at least, but not forward compatible.

      But I cut some slack for later Intels. See, their bread and butter has been performance per watt. An example is Haswell made a remarkable breakthrough in idle power use. This might have a big enough impact to make an entire nation's power use stagnate or decrease. The same CPU also has to get into laptops. So socket incompatibilities due to change in electrical specs can be justified in that way.

    33. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel also released the 486 DX/4, a great little CPU with L1 cache doubled to 16K and more megahertz but it runs at 3.3V. It will fit perfectly in 5V motherboards but when you turn it on it will burst to flames.

      if one wants to upgrade them, one has to closely match them w/ the chipset & everything else, or suffer a performance hit.

      I disagree only on this, since we stopped using a front side bus, i.e. everything since the original Athlon 64 and the i7 920, the chipset has done jack shit for performance. It's only the CPU, its built-in caches and the RAM speed/latency that count.

      BTW Intel did sell overpriced drop-in CPUs, the last one was a Pentium II Overdrive for Pentium Pro motherboards (I eventually learned it was used to upgrade a major supercomputer)

    34. Re:Why is this news? by gfxguy · · Score: 1

      I don't see the big deal

      The big deal is avoiding a situation like: "Oh, you want to plug in that USB 4 Device? Well you'll need to run out and buy a new computer." Or "The next windows forced update requires a new computer. Your current one will stop working in 3 days. See you in the checkout line!"

      So you're saying all currently existing computers should be USB 4 capable, despite the fact it doesn't even exist yet?

      You have a point with Windows, but even then there has never been an instance of "your current one will stop working." Even Windows will just stop supporting your platform and not issue updates anymore. There's too much exaggeration, too much hyperbole... nobody is "forcing" anybody to do anything.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    35. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Needlessly? Before asserting this, why not casually browse the pin-outs of two close ones: The LGA 1155 and 1151 come to mind. And do it from two perspectives: Why did Intel (have to?) loose the 4 pins from 1155 to 1151. They could easily use 4 dead pins and kept 1155. But of the remaining 1151 pins, needed new system boards for the new frequencies, voltages and data lanes. So the change was absolutely necessary, so an 1151 COULD NOT be placed in an 1155 socket.

    36. Re:Why is this news? by toddestan · · Score: 1

      While the whole slot thing didn't work out, they introduced it with the Pentium II and kept the same pin-out with the Pentium III. Even after they switched over to Socket 370 they kept making Slot 1 CPU's all the way to the end of the Coppermine generation (past 1 GHz), with only the final generation Tualatin CPU's being Socket 370 only. Though I would argue that in many ways the P2 and P3 really could have been considered one generation.

      A real fiasco would be the following short-lived Socket 423, the almost forgotten first generation of Pentium 4. Introduced with the 1.4 GHz P4, the fastest CPU was 2.0 GHz before they switched to Socket 478, only compatible with Rambus memory, barely faster than the previous Pentium 3's...

    37. Re:Why is this news? by KingBenny · · Score: 1

      yea well, the question is, do i need it ? or do i need it to brag to my-phone-is-bigger-than-yours-boy ? 2 of my 3 pcs have a bloody celeron cpu in it, they do everything i need them to with flying colours running linux, i doubt they would boot windows 10 in under an hour though, but linux works at normal speeds in a graphical environment (and theres no directx on linux anyway worth mentioning) ... the other one has an amd am3+ socket still which, combined with a gtx970 runs about everything i need up til now so intel ... since i dont really do my-phone-is-bigger-than-yours-contests tell me why i need one ?

      --
      Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
    38. Re:Why is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Got to hand it to VB developers, will they every be able to drop VB6 runtime support in one form or another? =)

  3. Is anyone surprised? by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For the last 10 years since Intel gained complete monopoly control over Intel chipsets for Intel CPU's they go out of their way to make minor changes to force new motherboards to feed their income from chipsets. They add a pin or two or make some other minor change that makes it impossible to use new cpus with older montherboards even if the chipset is identical in features.

    This is SOP at Intel these days. Use that Monopoly power to extract maximum revenue. Hell the new Platinum Xeon chips have MSRP's of up to $13,000. Something that would not be possible with legitimate competition.

    1. Re: Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People buying $13k chips are not upgrading a chip in place on a board, ever. We replace the entire thing , because these are used in high end rack servers and custom appliances where we actually make full use of the 14 physical cores on both of the cpus on a board, along with the terrabyte of RAM and 100gig+ network card.

    2. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doesn't matter. CPU ain't the bottleneck it once was.

    3. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hell the new Platinum Xeon chips have MSRP's of up to $13,000. Something that would not be possible with legitimate competition.

      Why not? AMD has been in the lead several times in the last decade for high-density virtualisation workloads, which didn't affect the price of Xeons one bit. They cost that much because they're worth that much to the intended market.

    4. Re:Is anyone surprised? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 0, Troll

      Does AMD have an equivalent to Intel's $13,000 CPU? Even if they did who cares what they charge? Are you upset that a Ferrari costs 10x the price of a Honda?

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    5. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 5, Funny

      Are you upset that a Ferrari costs 10x the price of a Honda?

      Yes.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    6. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if they did who cares what they charge?

      Everyone with any authority or responsibility beyond their personal system in the technology sector cares because their pricing unnecessarily impacts the budget.

      Perhaps you are not part of that group.

    7. Re:Is anyone surprised? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

      If this chip was so overpriced then nobody would be buying them. If you need that much performance in a single CPU then $13K is trivial relative to the rest of the costs.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    8. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm surprised. It's supposed to be a second "optimisation" phase in the "process-architecture-optimization" model. It's generally expected to be compatible with the "architecture" phase (Skylake), much like how Devils Canyon was compatible with Haswell. It's also very unexpected that the second optimisation is incompatible with the first optimisation (Kaby Lake).

    9. Re:Is anyone surprised? by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

      You've lost track of time buddy. AMD hasn't been in the lead for more than a decade, last time they were on top GW Bush had just been elected.

    10. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So sorry, I should not have snuck up on you like that. My name is Sebastian Cobb. Intel hired me to build their CPU. They cut corners everywhere. Overpriced, new socket, and the celebrity at the launch event was was Gallagher.

    11. Re: Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      13k is a tiny part of the cost of system tbat needs that much performance on a single chip. You obviously dont purchase systems that need this type of performance as if you did you would know how dumb your post was

    12. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does AMD have an equivalent to Intel's $13,000 CPU?

      You mean like this?
      http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-naples-32-core-cpu-benchmarks-leaked/

    13. Re: Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I got two $8k Xeons for free as pulls because the vendor upgraded the CPUs in order to help us finish our review of their server.

    14. Re: Is anyone surprised? by koomba · · Score: 1

      Thank you. I see so many people saying "yeah, what did you expect? Intel always does this, not surprised at all," like that's the end of it.

      Yes, they used to almost never give us 2 generations on the same socket, but that was when they were still on the tick-tock release schedule, when they were still aggressively pushing the advance of the process node size.

      But that has slowed down now, as Coffee Lake is the 3rd chip on the 14nm process for the mainstream socket, in line with their new 3 step process upgrade system. So like someone said, this should have, and was expected to, still be compatible with the z270 chipset, the same way Devils Canyon worked on the Haswell chipset.

    15. Re: Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I thought Epyc was released a month or two ago.

    16. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They have a massive lead today in price/performance.

      CPU's that are within 90-95% of Intel cores, per clock per core, but vastly more cores per dollar in some cases(1700x vs i7), and simply much cheaper in others (4 core/8 thread)

      Stock clocks are close enough to not matter except for the highest end i7 gaming cpu.

      They aren't the best, no. They DO, without debate, factually, get you far more CPU per dollar and a stones throw from Intel performance numbers.

      They'll be what I upgrade my Haswell to in a few years for sure.

    17. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      there are times when comments are so stupid it's not worth pointing out how and why the comment is stupid. this is one of those times.

    18. Re:Is anyone surprised? by fnj · · Score: 1

      If you need that much performance in a single CPU then $13K is trivial relative to the rest of the costs.

      A complete and utter non-sequitur. If may or may not be trivial relative to total cost. I'm actually pretty goddam sure a $13K CPU is likely to dwarf the cost of the rest of the system - unless it has some outlandish amount of installed RAM - like terabytes.

    19. Re:Is anyone surprised? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

      So you're going to install a few gigs of ram and a 1tb drive and call it a day? This is for data centers or render farms. They're going to have racks full of drives. What do you think a SAN array costs?

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    20. Re:Is anyone surprised? by slew · · Score: 1

      They have a massive lead today in price/performance.

      CPU's that are within 90-95% of Intel cores, per clock per core, but vastly more cores per dollar in some cases(1700x vs i7), and simply much cheaper in others (4 core/8 thread)

      Stock clocks are close enough to not matter except for the highest end i7 gaming cpu.

      They aren't the best, no. They DO, without debate, factually, get you far more CPU per dollar and a stones throw from Intel performance numbers.

      They'll be what I upgrade my Haswell to in a few years for sure.

      The problem for AMD isn't perf/dollar** it is perf/watt. Most data centers care about perf/watt. Most home enthusiasts don't care as much about that and don't think much about the cost of electricity (both power and cooling).

      **AMD mostly just takes it in the shorts on their gross margins to make their products cheaper...

    21. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes and AMD had 16-core CPUs an age ago (two 8-core FX next to each other basically) but 6-core Sandy Bridge was embarrassingly near it performance wise.

      These 12-core and 16-core AMDs were probably great if you needed a single high-memory, high-cores system but if you want to put 200 of them in a room forget about it. Unless you can build a Hoover dam and one of these cooling towers we typically associate with nuclear power plants.

    22. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes it is for terabytes RAM (and/or RAS features) in fact they go as far as to sell a $7K Xeon with up to 768GB per CPU and the same one at $10K for up to 1.5TB per CPU.

      So if you get the $10K or $13K CPU to install 96GB RAM per CPU you're stupid.

    23. Re:Is anyone surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you upset that a Ferrari costs 10x the price of a Honda?

      Yes.

      Sounds like a personal problem to me.

      Have you considered brave introspection -- perhaps with the assistance of a mental health professional -- in discovering the cause of your upset, and then addressing the cause, so you won't be upset? It seems a silly thing to be upset about.

  4. Help me AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're my only hope

  5. Upgrading CPUs? by kugeln · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Do people really "upgrade" processors? I mean, I've been building computers for almost 20 years now and I think I got over the whole idea of upgrading the processor after the first time, circa 1997.

    Outside of the gimmicky super-shredder-killer-fps-man-slayer motherboards, it's not like they have been the most expensive part of a computer build for a long time. Introducing a new video card incompatibility like the transition from PCI -> AGP -> PCI Express would be a whole different story.

    1. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've done it a couple of time. Went as far as upgrading the processor in a laptop back in 2009. That was the last time I upgraded a processor, though. At this point, it is cheaper selling the old one and getting a new system.

      However, were I still building my own system (which I haven't done since early 2000s) I would upgrade processors. No reason getting a whole new motherboard if it's all still compatible. You can add more RAM, new CPU and end with an up-to-date system for half the price... so why not?

    2. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly. I don't think I've had a processor upgrade (AMD or Intel) which didn't involve a new motherboard inside the last 15 years. Usually it's easier to just build most of a new system and maybe re-use a few hard drives, the case or PSU.

    3. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by glitch! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No. When I upgrade, I get a new motherboard and CPU. And often, new memory for the MB. I have built systems for maybe 25 years, and I don't remember doing a simple CPU upgrade. But I did swap out a Cyrix CPU because it kept crashing Win95.

      --
      A dingo ate my sig...
    4. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      The last Intel socket change was for DDR4 support, so there goes the "add more RAM" reason...

      These days the year-on-year improvements in performance are getting less and less significant in terms of actually noticing it.
      Every few years though. something else ends up being upgraded, like DDR technology, PCIe generations, thunderbolt, USB3...
      These things usually end up getting implemented (except USB3?) in the CPU, which then needs to be passed via the socket and chipset to a connector somewhere.
      Even if the new stuff is done solely in the chipset, the interface between the chipset and CPU only has so much bandwidth.

      The X99 chip only had 20Gbit via DMI 2
      DMI 3 doubles that to 40Gbit

      A thunderbolt 3 port does 40Gbit by itself...

    5. Re: Upgrading CPUs? by DCstewieG · · Score: 2

      I finally did this for the first time recently. My almost 5 year old build with a Sandy Bridge i3 and Radeon 6850 was barely acceptable for Overwatch...playable at the lowest settings. Got an Ivy Bridge i5 off eBay (dual to quad core was huge but also better clock) and a new 1060 and now Iâ(TM)ve got even Doom and Gears 4 running max settings at 1080p with 60fps.

    6. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Years ago I played musical chairs with several Athlon64 parts and several motherboards, rotating CPUs around and retiring the slowest and eventually replacing failing motherboards. There comes a point when the value price and performance sweet spot has definitely moved to different sockets and RAM formats.

      When the core2duo came out, I got an E3600 or whatever the 2-core unit was. After a year I got the Q6600 quad-core which was essentially two of my previous chip in one package, so I swapped out CPUs on my existing Dell workstation. I eventually put back the dual-core and sold the whole machine to a used computer shop, took the quad-core on an airplane in my carry-on bag, and installed it in a new $100 motherboard I bought from newegg upon arriving in a new city for my next job. I still have that CPU running in a PC acting as my PVR, over 10 years since I purchased it, largely because I'm too lazy to do any maintenance on it.

      In the same years, I set up a similar PVR for an older relative with a socket AM3+ motherboard and the value priced AMD Phenom x3 that was available back then. I eventually put a cheaper Athlon part with 6 cores in the same board to give them a boost for video transcoding. That motherboard eventually started to get flaky and I gutted their system and replaced it with a Skylake quad-core where I can use the iGPU instead of a cheap radeon card. The new machine is vastly over-powered but uses much less wattage. I don't think I'd see a reason to upgrade it piecemeal other than if storage products and price points massively shift before they need a replacement HDD or run out of disk space. The Skylake is so fast that I have been transcoding a backlog of MPEG2 into MPEG4 for this relative so I can avoid storage expansion projects.

    7. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by somenickname · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've built systems for about that long and I did a simple CPU upgrade about 2 years ago. About 6 years ago I built a dual Xeon E5645 workstation for myself ($500 per CPU at build time) and two years ago I upgraded them to Xeon X5690 CPUs. The X5690 CPUs were about $2000 each when I built the machine but only $200 each used on eBay 4 years later. I've also piecemeal upgraded a bunch of other parts like RAM, disks, etc.

      The end result is a 6 year old workstation with shockingly good performance when compared to anything but a new $5000k workstation. I recently got the upgrade bug and decided to use the Phoronix Test Suite to test the performance of my workstation against modern i7 and Xeon chips. The new i7 chips were definitely much faster at single core tasks but, my old school Dual Xeon X5690, with 4xRAID5 SATA*2* SSDs and 96GB of RAM, handily crushed them for any task I care about: Compilation times, multi-core number crunching, etc.

      My point is that if you buy cheap and shitty consumer grade hardware, you can expect to throw it away after a few years. If you buy low end professional/enterprise hardware, and that suits your needs, you have a cheap and easy upgrade path.

    8. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I went from a Pentium II 350 to a P III 850 - just before the P4 was coming out so the 850 was cheap.
      Basically, for a very low cost I got to keep that system going for another year or so - that's the advantage of socket compatibility.

      Whenever new memory comes out, or a new graphics card slot - something architecturally significant the old stuff drops in price so you can get the best of the old stuff and upgrade for cheap.

      This was all before I had a proper job, so messing around with hardware configs and picking parts was a fun use of my time back then (given the money I had).

    9. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Do people really "upgrade" processors?

      Sure... on AMD systems. On intel systems? No, they really don't, because Intel changes their CPU socket at the drop of a hat. Any hat.

      My desktop PC started as a Phenom II X3 720, then it was a Phenom II X6 1045T, and now it's a FX-8350. All in the same socket. I built other PCs to take the hand-me-down processors, and do other jobs. (One Linux box, one test bench.)

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    10. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      Builders that lean towards AMD upgrade their cpu's... builders that lean towards Intel never could.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    11. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do people really "upgrade" processors?

      I've done it relatively recently when I bought a new motherboard for one of my machines. I deliberately chose the about-to-be-superseded socket (4th gen i3/5/7 ?) and populated it with the cheapest processor available. Then as the better processors were remaindered I snapped up an i7 and swapped that in instead.

      Can't see myself doing it without forward planning like that though.

    12. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by RogueyWon · · Score: 1

      I'm one of those guys who likes to have a top-end gaming PC. Spend quite a lot of money on it. Put a lot of thought into when to do part-swaps and when to go for a whole new system.

      I'm not really sure this is going to matter all that much for most people, even for people like me. Even for high-end gaming (i.e. trying to hold 60fps with high/ultra graphics settings at 4k), the CPU upgrade cycle isn't particularly intense. If you're using a decent Skylake or Kaby Lake (e.g. a 6700K or 7700K) you should be good with it for years. Your GPU is going to be the bottleneck under almost all real-world scenarios.

      If you're on an older CPU (a second or third gen i7, for instance) then you might be starting to hit CPU bottlenecks and it might be time to think about an upgrade. But then the sockets changed for Skylakes, so you'd be looking at a new mobo (and other associated components) whatever you went to.

      tl;dr version - you probably don't need a CPU upgrade. If you are one of the fringe cases that does, you were always going to be looking at a new mobo (and probably starting over with a new PC anyway) whether or not Coffee Lake changed the socket size.

    13. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Ramze · · Score: 1

      I upgraded an entire engineering computer lab's worth of CPUs once... in 1996. lol. Those Pentiums swapped out pretty easily and Cyrix P166+ processors fit nicely into the same slots as old Pentium 60s (though even then, the motherboards were a bit of a bottleneck at times). A roughly 2.5 x jump in cpu speed back then meant a lot for NT4 boxes running AutoCAD and other engineering software.

      Today... I can't imagine why anyone would bother (though maybe it's my lack of imagination's fault).

      CPUs aren't usually the bottleneck for performance. Moving to an SSD and a better graphics card tend to make the biggest difference (used to be a RAM upgrade would do the trick, but now most machines come with an adequate amount of RAM and Win10 has gotten much better about memory management).

      These days, most people have a laptop instead of a desktop... same story -- upgrade to an SSD, upgrade the RAM if necessary... but... many can't upgrade the GPU. So, the laptop gets tossed for a new laptop. Hopefully Thunderbolt 3 / USB C will change that somewhat with external GPUs, but I'm skeptical.

      Anyway... I haven't swapped out a CPU for anyone in over 20 years. Even though it's partially due to the slot changes, even if it were possible to fit the newest, latest & greatest CPU into some of my older boxes, the CPUs would be crippled by the lack of features from the motherboards. It wouldn't make any sense to do it. Sure. Put that Core i7 into my 10 year old board w/ DDR2 and PCIe 1x and a voltage regulator that won't let it ramp up to full speed or work with power stepping properly... and I'd need a new heat sink.

      The real reason they don't bother keeping the same slots is b/c features change and most people keep their computers for 7+ years now anyway. I have 2 that are over 10 years old and still play Netflix and Youtube streaming vids just fine -- even some 1080p h.265 videos without a hiccup (though would play more if I had a decent video card so they'd use the vid card instead of the cpu for h.265) They're my backup and testing machines as I've moved on to gaming laptops... current one is 4 years old & I am only now considering buying a gaming PC -- to replace the laptop for gaming purposes (I want 3 monitors and streaming/video capture), but the gaming laptop will still be used for all sorts of multimedia and gaming.

      But, back to the topic, what's really a reasonable time frame to keep the same slot? I'd say only so long as it's practical -- which would mean for every new cpu feature that required a change to the motherboard to enable, get a new slot.

      The great part of this is that the OLD motherboards and CPUs will get a price reduction as vendors try to clear their inventory. I'll be on the lookout for great deals! Still... I'll probably get a Ryzen7 or Threadripper... b/c maybe by Christmas the prices will be more sane and will be even better price/performance compared to Intel.

    14. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by lexman098 · · Score: 1

      Builders that lean towards AMD upgrade their cpu's

      Have you? I had a Phenom II on AM3 and kind of wanted an upgrade. No option for that since the FX line used AM3+. But hey, if I bought a brand new system with an AM3+ mobo at least I could downgrade to a shitty Phenom! This just the nature of technology.

    15. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've never upgraded a processor on its own, but I've had the reverse problem: my motherboard failed. The processor was still fine, but the motherboard was out of production, and I couldn't find a compatible replacement. I had to buy a new motherboard and processor, and scrap the functional old processor.

    16. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, a reference to pre-beard Star Trek:TNG. Nice.

    17. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by gfxguy · · Score: 1

      That's the thing - we're not talking about people who buy a complete system, or even who hack together a system because they simply prefer picking and choosing components (like me) over getting whatever vendors decided to put in. I build my own system so that I can do things like getting quiet fans and power supplies; I also know the graphics card installed on most systems (usually some built in crap) is not going to be good enough. I'm not a big gamer, but I do play, and I do use some graphics apps professionally.

      Somebody who spends $3k to $4k building some super gaming rig should not be daunted by having to upgrade the MB as well as the CPU. If it's going to be compatible with at least one more generation, in particular, because after that you'd be upgrading pretty much everything anyway.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    18. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by fnj · · Score: 1

      Do people really "upgrade" processors?

      Yes. Duh.

    19. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right, but the phenom II board supported 4 core and later 6 core processors. If you had bought the 890fx platform when the 6 core phenoms were released you could have used that board with bulldozer cpus as well. It's really just to bad that AMD never made a CPU better than the PII x6 on that platform.

    20. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What is your point, People don't upgrade them because the compatibility is always being broken so nobody can. Chicken and egg.

    21. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by jittles · · Score: 1

      Do people really "upgrade" processors? I mean, I've been building computers for almost 20 years now and I think I got over the whole idea of upgrading the processor after the first time, circa 1997.

      Outside of the gimmicky super-shredder-killer-fps-man-slayer motherboards, it's not like they have been the most expensive part of a computer build for a long time. Introducing a new video card incompatibility like the transition from PCI -> AGP -> PCI Express would be a whole different story.

      I did a few years ago. I wanted to build a home server with a XEON processor that was so expensive that I did not want to make the initial purchase. So, I built a system with a really cheap i3 that cost me about $70 and waited until the EOL on the XEON processor. Then I bought it brand new for $120 instead of the ~$600 it originally retailed for. I dropped it in and away I went.

    22. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That option's been around for a while and very well known. It's a trade-off, and one I decided against. The X5690 is quite similar to a high end i7, but for less money. However, the motherboards for Xeon, or the workstations they go inside of (because different power supplies for the motherboards and so on) tend to be very expensive. The motherboards might be dual socket and have tons of ECC memory slots, but they also have older PCI-e 2, no USB 3, SATA 2 and so on. So limited video performance, reduced disk performance (or expensive controllers), etc. Older disk controllers in that era of computer tend not to support disk sizes above 2TB either... Tons of compromises everywhere. And many parts are quite expensive (even CPU heat sinks!) All that, for more cores and RAM that most people are going to make use of, and while using up a LOT of power. For most people, the i7 is the better option. Cheaper overall, similar everyday performance, less power usage.

    23. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      And? Just because you can doesn't mean you need to. The problem was in the past the chipset changes were far more common and computers were far more expensive. Upgrades were huge increases and big deals that drove people to wait and then spend on big changes when they happen.

      No so in the past 10 years. Why change a motherboard when you don't have to? My current motherboard is on it's 3rd Processor, 3rd video card, and 2nd memory upgrade (though memory is maxed out now).

      I had the option with the last processor change to spend $250 on a CPU, or $500 on a CPU + motherboard, the latter which gets me ... just more head room for the next upgrade but no actual other benefit.

    24. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FYI USB3 is actually implemented into Ryzen CPU and Bristo Rige APUs - the plan is to allow low end or very low power/footprint motherboards without a chipset and with less I/O, we're waiting for these still. These will be A300 (low end) and X300 (high end) motherboards.

      Intel did built USB2/3 into a CPU as well, it's the Xeon D (Broadwell) server platform. It has specs incredibly close to a Ryzen (eight cores, two DDR4 channels, built-in I/O) but single CPU / single die only.

    25. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I bought an AM2 motherboard with the cheapest CPU then upgraded to an AM3 dual core CPU. Now I'd like to upgrade to an Athlon II X4 but it was discontinued quite a while ago and the used is not what it used to - people toss out entire systems, so I might get the used CPU for 30 euros on ebay, or get an entire tower desktop for not much more or even for free...

      Perhaps I should get a Phenom II X4, but first thing I would need to do is to go into BIOS set up and underclock it. As this is not an AM2+ mobo the separate lower voltage for memory controller is not supported, and it's a cheap mobo too. So I can make a Phenom shittier to get around lack of support of high power CPUs I guess!

    26. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      Have you? I had a Phenom II on AM3 and kind of wanted an upgrade. No option for that since the FX line used AM3+

      Firstly, quite a few of the later AM3 motherboards supported AM3+ chips with a bios update because the AM3 socket was first modified to the "black block" version that had a hole (unconnected) for the extra pin of future AM3+ cpu's.

      Secondly, early adopters of AM3 could upgrade all the way to AMD's Thuban line of processors. I upgraded from a dual core Athon II to a hexa core Phenom II.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    27. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by toddestan · · Score: 1

      I've done it a few times. In 2005 my early Athlon XP was feeling a bit sluggish, so I grabbed one of the Barton Semprons for cheap and threw it in there, which actually got all the way to 2009 when I decided to finally replace it - much longer than I ever expected that system to last, to be honest.

      I upgraded a AMD Phenom II X2 to a Phenom II X6, which was a considerable improvement. I eventually stuck the old X2 back in there when I gave the system to my mom because she had no need for 6 cores and the X2 ran much cooler.

      I've also upgraded the CPU on many older systems when they reach the point where I'm getting compatible hardware for free (dumpsters, etc.). My Thinkpad has a Core 2 Due T7400 because of this, a CPU that model was never actually sold with. Same deal with my server, originally a Pentium D but the first generation Core 2 chips work in the same motherboard, which is an all-around improvement. My current computer also has a free Ivy Bridge i7 in it, when I originally built it with a Sandy Bridge CPU. I would say Ivy Bridge computers from the dumpster would be an exception, but I've got two more Ivy Bridge CPUs in the parts bin (an i5 and a Pentium) from the same source...

    28. Re:Upgrading CPUs? by lexman098 · · Score: 1

      I upgraded from a dual core Athon II to a hexa core Phenom II.

      Wasn't the Phenom II available at the same time as the Athlon II? Maybe you just bought the wrong CPU to begin with.

  6. It's always this way by surfdaddy · · Score: 1

    I keep my systems at least 3 years. Although the theory is that you can swap to a better CPU I've only done this one time. Most of the time Intel deliberately continues evolving the sockets, not for any real technical reason AFAIKT, but to keep you buying those motherboards. This is one of the reasons that I don't upgrade processors very often (I skip a few generations) as the gains are small enough that it's just not worth it for the cost and hassle.

    1. Re:It's always this way by jonwil · · Score: 1

      The last time I upgraded my CPU without replacing the motherboard would have been when I upgraded from a Pentium 166 MMX to a 300MHz Cyrix part and even then I ended up regretting it and wishing I had moved to a Pentium II or something instead.

  7. This is the MAIN Reason.... by Zurkeyon3733 · · Score: 1

    That I buy AMD. They tend to at least attempt backwards compatibility and accept that you may ONLY buy a new CPU. Intel wants you to mortgage your house for every Release.... There is a reason you are expected to lose up to 25% market share this year Intel... Stuff like this... Is it.

    1. Re:This is the MAIN Reason.... by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      That I buy AMD.

      Ryzen. Released February 2017. Socket: AM4
      Threadripper Released July 2017. Socket: TR4

      They didn't even make it 6 months without requiring you change sockets to get the l latest CPU.

    2. Re:This is the MAIN Reason.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not a valid comparison. No one's talking about socket compatibility between high-end CPUs like threadripper and mass-market CPUs like Ryzen, we're talking about compatibility between generations of CPUs in the same market. Intel's X series chips also have different sockets from their lesser mainstream core i7s within the same generation. Part of the reason is the high end CPUs from both vendors support more PCIe lanes into the CPU, requiring more pins for signaling and data transfer..

      The question will be whether AMD lives up to its commitment to maintain the same sockets in each market for at least 2 years. If they come out with a Ryzen 1850X in a year or so and it uses a different socket from current Ryzens go ahead and complain.

      To be fair, it's true that the Kaby Lake CPUs were socket compatible with the previous generation, so Intel isn't changing its approach by requesting a new socket now.

    3. Re:This is the MAIN Reason.... by rajafarian · · Score: 1

      This is not an incremental update, though.

    4. Re:This is the MAIN Reason.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The question will be whether AMD lives up to its commitment to maintain the same sockets in each market for at least 2 years. If they come out with a Ryzen 1850X in a year or so and it uses a different socket from current Ryzens go ahead and complain.

      Can I complain about the FM1 socket?

  8. they're trying to help AMD by deathguppie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'ts been a long time since AMD has released a competitive product. Intel in a show of appreciation and friendship has decided that the best way to help them along is to assure that unlike the new series of ryzen processors coming out theirs will not be backwards compatible with the hardware you buy. Why else would they restrict the pcie lanes in their top of the line chips by price and lock out features unless they were trying to help AMD along.

    --
    once more into the breach
    1. Re:they're trying to help AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      something like today's kaby and yesterday's sky chips working on the same board (if you pick the right board, anyway) is somewhat of a rarity with intel. intel has steered clear of easy upgrade paths for pretty much the entire existence of the pc market. and NEITHER company is a true champion of DIYers; both companies have forced numerous socket changes and have had very short-lived platforms. the chipsets are easier to produce with less waste, have higher margins on average, and they can sell one for every cpu if they do things 'right' and force a new board for every new cpu purchase. of course they're going to make us buy new shit every generation.. it's in their best interests.. and as public corporations, it's in the best interest of shareholder value.

    2. Re:they're trying to help AMD by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      NEITHER company is a true champion of DIYers; both companies have forced numerous socket changes and have had very short-lived platforms.

      Seldom have I seen a more disingenuous statement on Slashdot. AMD has never had a short-run platform, and has never forced a socket change just to force people to buy new motherboards. AMD has always kept support on their old platforms going well after their creation. Check out for example the lifespan on GEODE compared to single-core Atom, you will apparently be surprised. Meanwhile, Intel has clearly made several changes designed specifically to sell more motherboards, which means selling more overpriced chipsets. AMD CPUs are cheaper per flop and AMD chipsets are cheaper per GB/sec or by PCI-E lane. No matter how you slice it, Intel are bigger assholes than AMD.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:they're trying to help AMD by Kazymyr · · Score: 1

      Hm. Socket 939 comes to mind. Announced as the socket that will end all, and that will be supported for the foreseeable future. Sidetracked in less than a year, and discontinued shortly after.

      --
      I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
    4. Re:they're trying to help AMD by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Hm. Socket 939 comes to mind. Announced as the socket that will end all, and that will be supported for the foreseeable future. Sidetracked in less than a year, and discontinued shortly after.

      One year and eleven months (June 2004-May 2006) and parts were still available well after, with a motherboard coming out as late as 2009.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:they're trying to help AMD by Kazymyr · · Score: 1

      Motherboards, yes. But no new CPUs. The point being that, when you talk about "CPU upgrade" you usually mean putting a faster CPU in the same motherboard, not keeping the same CPU and buying a newer motherboard. AMD made socket 939 a dead-end for upgrades much sooner than everyone was promised.

      --
      I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
    6. Re:they're trying to help AMD by toddestan · · Score: 1

      The funny thing is I always considered 939 to be kind of long lived, after the very short dead end known as Socket 754.

      I will give them Socket A and AM2, both relatively long lived, and Socket AM2 had some compatibility with the later AM2+ and AM3 sockets.

  9. Why this matters. by dohzer · · Score: 0, Troll

    Why this matters: it doesn't.

    1. Re:Why this matters. by Nethead · · Score: 1

      Exactly. The last time I upgraded a CPU on a mother board was to move from a 25MHz '486 to a 66MHz one. Anything less than 5 years old is fast enough for most cases. Spend the money on an SSD or more RAM.

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
    2. Re:Why this matters. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People who have a Kaby Lake chip already have an SSD and more RAM. This is about people who really love running the latest stuff. And I'd guess most of the grief about it will be a combination of "but I bought the fanciest board" and "do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to swap a motherboard!"

    3. Re:Why this matters. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't matter - there haven't been significant performance improvements generation-to-generation for a long while. The improvements have been in other areas besides performance (power, cost, chipsets, etc) which are of interest to computer manufacturers but not so much to enthusiasts.

  10. AMD by c++horde · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I was waiting for this CPU, but I might as well make the migration to AMD now if I'm having to buy a new motherboard. Intel needs to get their act together, their pissing their customers off.

  11. Already switched to AMD by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've already switched to AMD Ryzen CPUs for new systems because they're fast, cheap and stable. Not sure why I'd use Intel for anything here on out; instead I can spend more on video cards and larger SSD storage.

    1. Re:Already switched to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Intel rocks for gaming. They make faster CPUs per core by a good margin still as not everything can be run in parallel

    2. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      Ehh, depending on your needs, Intel can still make a lot of sense. If single or low-threaded performance is more important to you (e.g. a lot of gaming, sadly), Intel still has the lead in terms of per-core performance. And from what I've gathered (admittedly, I haven't investigated either side much), AMD's integrated video performance lags behind Intel's, so if you're forgoing the video card, Intel may make more sense (again, take that with a massive grain of salt). But if you're going to be using it for well-parallelized tasks, AMD is a VERY strong contender, given that it packs more cores in at the same price points. That said, if Coffee Lake really does bump Intel's standard offering up to 6 cores, Intel would have eliminated that advantage.

      All of which is to say, it's finally an exciting time in the industry again, and I'm quite happy for it.

    3. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Gaming is one of the classic examples of embarassingly parallel as shown by all those processing units in video cards.
      Of course some developers can't wrap their heads around more than one thread - even ones born after multiple CPUs were in desktop computers!

    4. Re:Already switched to AMD by Kjella · · Score: 2

      Gaming is one of the classic examples of embarassingly parallel as shown by all those processing units in video cards.

      Graphics, yes. Gaming? No. From what I've understood most games have divided threads by task, this thread does AI, this thread does rendering and so on. Which is why so many games still do well on dual cores, there's one core running the main loop and one running everything else. Not even Civilization VI, the kind of game that possibly could use lots of cores for the computer's AI manages to use 8 cores.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How to show you have no idea!

    6. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FYI: Your tone is one of disagreement, but your points do not dispute what GP wrote.

    7. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Except for multiplayer FPSs at 1080p on max settings or Ashes of the Benchmark, also on max settings, at competitive levels(In which case real gamers go to low settings anyway) there is no gaming reason to buy Intel over Ryzen. As for integrated performance, the IGPUs that are that good are expensive enough that you could buy a 1600+1050ti and have better graphics performance anyway.

    8. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Not even Civilization VI, the kind of game that possibly could use lots of cores for the computer's AI manages to use 8 cores.

      That's a good illustration of that problem with developers isn't it?
      The number of times I've seen something struggling on one core when there are seven free is maddening.
      Games, especially very graphical ones with a simulated 3D environment and sound sources located in 3D have a lot of things they could be doing at once. The sensible thing is to divide threads by task (as said above) but there isn't a lot of that going on.

    9. Re:Already switched to AMD by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As a professional game developer, I can assure you that videogames are the exact opposite of an "embarrassingly parallel" problem. There's a LOT more to videogames than graphical processing: AI, pathfinding, physics, audio, resource and memory management, animation, world updates / occlusion systems, etc. These are all CPU-intensive subsystems, and many of them are inherently bound to global data (a virtual world simulation), which makes it extremely tricky to split off into independent threads (probably the only exception being audio).

      That means that each subsystem in the game must be carefully and painstakingly optimized for threaded performance. It's not possible to trivially split up all these subsystems by thread either. Many of these systems tend to interact with each other and the global world database, and that means the gains tend to be smallish and non-scalable in nature.

      Generally speaking, it's an extremely difficult problem, and one which I don't think the industry has really cracked yet. Believe me, if it were trivial to do, we've have done it a long time ago.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    10. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I seem to have had this discussion about just about everything in computing since the mid 1990s, the difference being most people found a situation where more than a single thread worked. You've given some examples yourself about multi-threading.
      I know that games are pretty well all about state but that doesn't mean some tasks can't be done with in parallel. You mentioned physics - consider how that's simulated in the numerical computing world and how some game engines are dealing with it in a similar way. Many problems in a simulation do seem to be highly parallel if more than a tiny area is modelled.

    11. Re:Already switched to AMD by jareth-0205 · · Score: 1

      Not even Civilization VI, the kind of game that possibly could use lots of cores for the computer's AI manages to use 8 cores.

      That's a good illustration of that problem with developers isn't it?
      The number of times I've seen something struggling on one core when there are seven free is maddening.
      Games, especially very graphical ones with a simulated 3D environment and sound sources located in 3D have a lot of things they could be doing at once. The sensible thing is to divide threads by task (as said above) but there isn't a lot of that going on.

      It's all very well offering armchair advice but the task of actually thinking through and making reliable logic in a parallel environment is beyond most humans, we just don't think that way and can't think that way. Until we come up with new programming paradigms that make this stuff easier & more reliable, we're always going to have this problem for general computing. Our languages and methods are designed around a single-threaded world.

    12. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      It's all very well offering armchair advice

      That is insulting.

      making reliable logic in a parallel environment is beyond most humans

      We are not supposed to be "most humans", we are supposed to be the ones that get those collections of silicon, copper etc running well. We're supposed to use all those years since high school to pick up the tricky stuff instead of stagnation.

      Our languages and methods are designed around a single-threaded world.

      Stuff was most likely written in FORTRAN to run in parallel before you were born.

    13. Re:Already switched to AMD by jareth-0205 · · Score: 1

      It's all very well offering armchair advice

      That is insulting.

      Wow, you're really easy to insult! I would say it's insulting to just assume that everybody is lazy rather than try to think of why the task might be just too hard. When software is still released buggy, when as an industry we still haven't worked out how to 'over-engineer' for safety without still throwing up catastrophic security holes or system crashes in important systems, when games are written by over-worked programmers in crunch mode for months on end... the whole industry is still horribly immature. But sure, it's laziness.

      The world needs hundreds of thousands of programmers, and they're not all going to be at your level. The process of making software needs to be resilient enough to handle them, you can't simply wish everyone was as proficient because they're never going to be.

    14. Re:Already switched to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      It's all very well offering armchair advice

      That is insulting.

      Wow, you're really easy to insult! I would say it's insulting to just assume that everybody is lazy rather than try to think of why the task might be just too hard. When software is still released buggy, when as an industry we still haven't worked out how to 'over-engineer' for safety without still throwing up catastrophic security holes or system crashes in important systems, when games are written by over-worked programmers in crunch mode for months on end... the whole industry is still horribly immature. But sure, it's laziness.

      The world needs hundreds of thousands of programmers, and they're not all going to be at your level. The process of making software needs to be resilient enough to handle them, you can't simply wish everyone was as proficient because they're never going to be.

      It was a little be-littling. But back to you? Why should a game developer waist his time with the CEO of Rockstar games want the unfinished piece of crap shipped before Christmas whether it is finish or not waste time optimizing for what 1% of gamers have?

      According to Steam majority still had 2 core cpus until 18 months ago thanks to the core2duos and cheap crappy laptops parents but their kids. Today it is now just approaching 4 core with no hyper-threads. Sure Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus on youtube all show i7s maxed out with 1080TIs in SLI in RGB goodness glory! But majority of gamers just got an i5 in the last year and a half!

      So keep it to 2+ threads is what 85% gamers use so why bother?

    15. Re:Already switched to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      I seem to have had this discussion about just about everything in computing since the mid 1990s, the difference being most people found a situation where more than a single thread worked. You've given some examples yourself about multi-threading.
      I know that games are pretty well all about state but that doesn't mean some tasks can't be done with in parallel. You mentioned physics - consider how that's simulated in the numerical computing world and how some game engines are dealing with it in a similar way. Many problems in a simulation do seem to be highly parallel if more than a tiny area is modelled.

      Did you just read his post? He is a game developer. What I wonder and perhaps grand parent could answer is if the problem is also not difficulty but rather most gamers still used 2 core cpus just 18 months ago on Steam survey? If some still have core2dio and cheap AMD dualcore Walmart special laptops to i5's then is it economical to parallel painstakingly code anyway?

      Until Ryzen takes over and 6 to 8 cores and hyper-threaded goodness become standard then why bother optimizing?

    16. Re:Already switched to AMD by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Until Ryzen takes over and 6 to 8 cores and hyper-threaded goodness become standard then why bother optimizing?

      It's important not to conflate average numbers on Steam versus what your game's particular demographic tends to use. When you say "Steam gamers", for instance, that's pretty much meaningless, as it's just an average across a *very* wide swath of gamers and gaming hardware.

      The latest AAA games will not simply not run well on a dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM and an integrated Intel GPU. The target audience for those types of games tends to be someone who has a moderately powerful desktop machine or a *very* beefy laptop. Those machines are likely to have 4 cores and eight hardware threads at *minimum*. So, threading optimization is obviously very much worthwhile for these types of games.

      Now that I've gone indie (I left my professional job about four years ago), my own game's target hardware is much more modest. So, in that case, I don't have to put in the same degree of optimization effort in my own engine as large studios do, since I'm a one man studio and can't put in the resources they do. There are plenty of older or lightweight indie games that those WalMart laptops will run just fine.

      In short, it really all depends on your game's minimum requirements and intended target audience.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    17. Re:Already switched to AMD by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      You are both retarded.

      The reason Civ6 performs so poorly and doesnt use a lot of threads is because the entire fucking game is an interpreted script built on top of shitty xml garbage.

      Its why those loading times are enormous even on an SSD.

      These Civ games have not gotten more advanced since Civ3. They have just been pushed into easier to maintain scripting so that their lead developers can hand off the maintenance to junior developers sooner, freeing up the lead developers for another title.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    18. Re:Already switched to AMD by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      And from what I've gathered (admittedly, I haven't investigated either side much), AMD's integrated video performance lags behind Intel's

      AMD has destroyed Intel on integrated graphics since the first AMD APU's which was over half a decade ago. Its not even close. The only parts Intel has that can compete are the "Iris Pro" chips which have extremely expensive edram bolted onto them such that a similar performing (in every way, cpu, gpu, i/o, etc..) AMD APU is literally 50% of the cost of Intels "Iris Pro" solutions.

      So "what you gather" is complete crap. "what you gather" is apparently so sketchy that you need to question the sources you "gather" from... because they are lying to you.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    19. Re:Already switched to AMD by Alioth · · Score: 1

      Well - no - /imperative/ languages and methods are designed around a single threaded world and have been graunched to fit the multithreaded world.

      However, there are languages and methods that work very well in a parallel world. Erlang to give one example - the only problem is no one's going to be writing games in Erlang any time soon, even though it's quite easy to write a highly reliable Erlang application that spawns tens of thousands of threads.

    20. Re:Already switched to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Until Ryzen takes over and 6 to 8 cores and hyper-threaded goodness become standard then why bother optimizing?

      It's important not to conflate average numbers on Steam versus what your game's particular demographic tends to use. When you say "Steam gamers", for instance, that's pretty much meaningless, as it's just an average across a *very* wide swath of gamers and gaming hardware.

      The latest AAA games will not simply not run well on a dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM and an integrated Intel GPU. The target audience for those types of games tends to be someone who has a moderately powerful desktop machine or a *very* beefy laptop. Those machines are likely to have 4 cores and eight hardware threads at *minimum*. So, threading optimization is obviously very much worthwhile for these types of games.

      Now that I've gone indie (I left my professional job about four years ago), my own game's target hardware is much more modest. So, in that case, I don't have to put in the same degree of optimization effort in my own engine as large studios do, since I'm a one man studio and can't put in the resources they do. There are plenty of older or lightweight indie games that those WalMart laptops will run just fine.

      In short, it really all depends on your game's minimum requirements and intended target audience.

      Cool thanks for answering my question. Curious if you own an AMD ryzen for your work or plan too if you do not mind me asking :-)

      I want AMD to succeed and wish they had better gaming performance for IPC per core. But hey for running Vms at my job they are great lol.

    21. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is partly why developing for the PS3 was so difficult-- most game developers tried to port their XBox / PC game architecture, and it was a miserable experience. Those who actually architected their game to take advantage of the PS3 architecture produced much better games.

      Similarly, if game developers were developing their games to run on 8+ core CPU's, then anyone trying to play that game on a "mere" 4 core i5 would be at a severe disadvantage.

      It's not that game design can't benefit from parallel processing-- it's that the lowest common hardware denominator pushes the industry towards only one or two threads.

    22. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you're targetting a dual-core or quad-core minimum spec, that's not surprising. Hopefully new games will make use of more cores, especially now with AMD.

    23. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      I was thinking specifically of Iris Pro, but thanks for calling me on that. I always welcome corrections when I get things wrong.

    24. Re:Already switched to AMD by bsDaemon · · Score: 1

      Civ6 on Steam is the only game I have. My laptop has a Xenon w/ 64GB of ECC RAM. The fist disk is 256GB of NVMe, then I have a 2TB disk I use for holding VMWare images, basically.

      After about 200 turns, it starts crawling. The other day, I finished a full 500 turn game after a few days poking at it here and there, and when I was done I tried to "exit to desktop" and the whole thing fucking crashed. Of course, Windows 10 Pro wouldn't let me start task manager on the monitor hooked in over the DVI, and I couldn't get it to stay popped over the zombie civ window and so I just said 'fuck it' and rebooted the laptop.

      Frankly, the performance on that game has me wanting to just uninstall it. I've probably got my $47 worth of play out if it by now anyway, and it makes my laptop feel as if it'll melt. Not even all that fun anyway -- but the performance is pretty much the worst of anything I've messed with in ages.

    25. Re:Already switched to AMD by jeff4747 · · Score: 1

      It's all very well offering armchair advice but the task of actually thinking through and making reliable logic in a parallel environment is beyond most humans

      Having done this many times, it's not nearly as hard as you portray.

      It does require more thought than single-threaded, and it does require letting go of the mindset that you know exactly what every single bit is doing at any moment.

      But it's well within the grasp of the vast majority of programmers. Especially with modern languages making it easier and easier to do.

    26. Re:Already switched to AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That, and also all the benchmarks for other software (basically everything but video encoding) are always faster on the i7700K than the 1700X (same price). You can see it on just about every reputable site like puget systems (popular CAD software like AutoCAD or SolidWorks, Photoshop, etc). It's also faster at most "everyday" office/browsing things (SunSpider, Kraken, Octane, WebXPRT, etc). Having 4 FAST threads still outperforms having 8 fast-ish ones in most tasks.

      Ryzen is competitive unlike everything AMD's made in the previous decade, but it's not the godsend all AMD fanboys are making it out to be either. Right now it looks like a "90% of the performance for 100% of the price" option. Either ways, the $460 1800X (easily a $1000 upgrade with a good mobo and lots of DDR4) still loses to my old 4790K in most benches still so that'd be a pointless upgrade

    27. Re:Already switched to AMD by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      I've got a six year old i7 (four cores), as my primary Windows dev machine. I also have other machines for porting to Mac and Linux, plus a music/audio workstation. All use Intel processors. I went independent a few years ago, so I don't have a lot of cash to burn on new hardware. These machines have to last me until I (hopefully) get my game out the door soon and start earning an income again. They work fine for me, since my game is targeting lower-spec machines anyhow.

      I've always pretty much stuck with Intel for my CPUs. Even so, I'll certainly check out AMD CPUs when its time to upgrade, but so far, they really haven't produced anything that can compete effectively with Intel. I'd love to see that change, as competition is good for everyone.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    28. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1
      A more polite way of saying "you don't know shit about the topic" is not an insult?

      and they're not all going to be at your level

      They had better be - I'm way below average - an engineer who does coding from time to time and who came in to computers a couple of decades ago to simulate physical processes. If I can do it why can't someone who's got a degree in the topic?

      It's not about keeping all cores busy - I'm more pissed off about waiting around because the developer is doing EVERYTHING in a single thread.

    29. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      But back to you? Why should a game developer waist his time with the CEO of Rockstar games want the unfinished piece of crap shipped before Christmas whether it is finish or not waste time optimizing for what 1% of gamers have?

      Because it's now optimizing for what 100% of gamers have.

    30. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure how that applies to me since I've never even seen Civ6.
      Have you considered that my comment was a lot more general than that?

    31. Re:Already switched to AMD by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Did you just read his post? He is a game developer

      Hence the post I wrote below the one you replied to - the "old dog" one. He will know all that stuff - others in this thread don't.

  12. DDR5? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Could this be because of the upcoming release of DDR5 RAM? I've seen some speculation that it will be released in 2018, but the Wikipedia page still says 2020.

    1. Re:DDR5? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DDR4 offerings and market are just about to become mature. I don't think the time is right for DDR5 yet, unless there is a significant technical benefit, or DDR4 fails to deliver on its promise.

    2. Re:DDR5? by jawtheshark · · Score: 1

      Well, you never know. Compare the transition from DDR to DDR2 to DDR3. DDR2 was only current for a very very short time. This reflects in dumpster diving finds: many DDR machines, many DDR3 machines... very very few DDR2 machines. DDR and DDR3 were "current" a very long time, especially DDR3. Everytime a new RAM technology comes around, you never know how long it will last.

      --
      Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
    3. Re:DDR5? by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "very very few DDR2 machines"

      Well, yea, it was practically impossible to find DDR2 in any size larger than 2GB for desktop systems and laptops, which made any machine running DDR2 effectively garbage for upgrading to modernish-standards since a huge chunk of them only ever shipped with two memory slots on the motherboard.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:DDR5? by jawtheshark · · Score: 1
      I have donated 2x DDR2 2GB SO-DIMM modules to someone running an older iMac. The sticks were originally used in my Fujitsu-Siemens Pa1510, bought in January 2007 with 2x512MB RAM and almost immediately upgraded to 2x2GB. A few years back 4GB was more than enough. The main problem with that configuration, was that -even if you had 64bit machines- only 3.5GB would be usable due to the chipsets.

      Hell, even today, 4GB is good enough if your workloads are light. My Ultrabook, granted "already ancient" from 2013, has soldered on 4GB and does just fine. For whatever most people do on their machines 4GB will work. Most of my other machines (DDR3) are at 16GB and I rarely even come close to that usage. Sweet spot seems to be 8GB, which gives you a bit more breathing room than staying at 4GB.

      However, base models (go look over at Dell for example) still sport 4GB RAM... Many tablets and surface-like machines are especially guilty, and just like with my Ultrabook, that's soldered on RAM.

      I agree that more RAM is better (with diminishing returns), but context does matter. Around the switch from DDR2 to DDR3, 4GB was indeed plenty.

      --
      Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
    5. Re:DDR5? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I looked for 2x4GB ddr2 on ebay and I was suprised. You can get them, now. They're only officially supported on AMD systems. Might work on some Intel systems if you have the right kind of chipset and BIOS. Lack of compatibility was likely a major reason why that RAM was elusive.

      would be running 10GB ddr2 now, if I hadn't had two fried slots (have some other motherboard to try but I have no idea of its reliability or working state)

  13. Not a big deal? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Intel has hardly ever had usable CPU upgrade on the same motherboard, generally they have kept compatibility for two consecutive generations. It's only like one year in between and has probably been for the OEMs' sake not the consumers. Maybe that's up to two years now that they've switched from tick-tock to process-architecture-optimization, but in any case the year-over-year improvements has been minimal so why? If you so desperately want to replace last year's Z270+CPU, sell them as a package deal and buy a new Z370+CPU combo. Though if you're doing it for the six-core, do yourself a favor and buy a Ryzen or if you must buy Intel then an X299. Doing it just for the two extra cores is stupid. Except for the fanbois who'll take any chance to trash talk the opposing team, is there anyone here who'll stand up and say they'll miss this upgrade path? I expect crickets...

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Not a big deal? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      Yeah, the tick-tock was what kept you able to upgrade a CPU. Other than that, memory chip changes and things like new buses kept the upgrade path of a new motherboard every 3 years a reasonable practice. However, my 2010 motherboard/CPU is still working fine and comes in at about 75% of the performance of the best CPUs you could buy as of 3 months ago, excluding CPUs costing more than my car.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    2. Re:Not a big deal? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Intel has hardly ever had usable CPU upgrade on the same motherboard

      Single core > multiple core > generation upgrade.

      There have been plenty of "usable" CPU upgrades on the same motherboard, especially on the lower end of the spectrum where the motherboard upgrade triples the cost of the total upgrade.

  14. Dont forget the early LGA 2011-v1 adopters too. by BrookHarty · · Score: 1

    I needed to upgrade, and LGA 2011 came out, figured it would be a good platform to go. Then intel moves to V3 and no more cpu upgrades for v1.

    So I'm stuck with 2x 2011-v1 systems, but I don't trust intel, and this just proves it.

    1. Re:Dont forget the early LGA 2011-v1 adopters too. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well when these systems will get old you will be "stuck" with upgrades to unicorn Xeons from e-bay and old ECC RAM you can buy for peanuts as it's plentiful and mostly unwanted. (if supported by motherboard)

  15. Bigger dies thanks to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Coffeelake got shaken up by AMD Ryzen. Intel freaking out is loading more cores on their CPUs as the newer i7s will go from 4 cores 4 threads to 8 cores 16 threads. The newer i5s are rumored to go from 4 cores to 4 to 8 cores with no hyperthreading.

    My guess is Intel quickly glued 2 CPUs together like they did with the i9 and now the socket has doubled in size :-)

    1. Re:Bigger dies thanks to AMD by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      The plan is apparently i3 goes from 2 to 4 cores, i5 goes from 4 to 6 and mainstream i7 goes from 4 to 6 with HT

    2. Re:Bigger dies thanks to AMD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      The K series of both the i5 and i7 will have 2 more cores so i5 8670K will have 6 cores and the i7 8770k will have 8 to match Ryzen. Another rumor is the i5 series will now have hyperthreading so the i5 will still have 4 cores with the exception of the K with 6 but will be hyperthreaded.

      These are just rumors. But it would make sense if INtel had to quickly double the cores that the die and pins would change. Of course this would double the cost of CPU production with 2 sizes?

  16. Re: hurrr durrr I'm a systemd developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    FTFY

  17. Who the hell upgrades a CPU? by Northdot · · Score: 1

    Fact is you're probably going to want that new motherboard for all the upgraded ports, memory support, features, etc. that your 4 year old motherboard simply doesn't have.

    TFS sounds like a typical conspiracy theory to ascribe greedy intentions to what is more than likely just technological progress.

    1. Re:Who the hell upgrades a CPU? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I built a system with a Phenom II X3 720. Then I upgraded it to a Phenom II X6 1045T. Then I upgraded my motherboard, and built another system with the X3. Then I upgraded my CPU again to FX-8350, and the X3 system became an X6.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  18. Dumping a socket standard is nothing new by macraig · · Score: 2

    Given that Intel has abused its industry dominance to first create and then abandon de facto socket standards perhaps two dozen times - who's keeping count now? - over its history, this is hardly a shocking maneuver. Rather it is entirely expected. They like to force people to buy all new hardware sooner rather than later, considering they're collecting royalties for much of it that doesn't have its brand name on it. Back in the Good Olde Days when there were actually other manufacturers competing to populate those same de facto standard sockets, Intel would abandon sockets just to shake up those little guys and drain their resources trying to retool and keep up. Having fully succeeded in eliminating ALL competition for their own de facto socket standards, they now do it just for grins and giggles (and perhaps for those licensing fees).

  19. It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We are in a bad bad timeline for hardcore and even regular PC enthusiasts, the technological leaps have stagnated significantly, where people with 7 year old PCs need only double their memory and add an SSD (if they didn't already have one) and almost all tasks are fast enough.

    The delay in shift from 14nm to 10nm has been pretty bad across the industry, in fact considering the performance improvements for processors, GPUs over the past 7 years, it seems quite apparent that the manufacturing process still plays a very heavy part in the performance boost between generations, just as much as architectural design of the processor.

    I have a fairly specific use case, similar but not quite the same to gamers (I want a ridiculously fast PC for general use, I'm an extreme browser, exceeding 100-400 tabs at a time, but I don't game anymore, so I like mid to small ITX, quiet, professional looking machines)
    I almost always have open from 8 to 25 applications open of varying kinds. I really like a very responsive system at sub $5000 expense (a 64gb, quad channel, DDR4 4000 machine with 12 cores, liquid cooled, would be great, but the cost would be insane and honestly, a complete top of the line, but not HEDT machine would likely do what I need at easily 30 to 50% savings)

    Unfortunately Intel is all over the place with product varieties, when you look around the Intel ARK site (the new one is awful, great job web developers, great job, another unecessary redesign) you can see just how many processors they make, from 6w to 150w across all kinds of segments.
    Sadly the days of a "preemo desktop" CPU being their primary bread and butter is over and that's why we see ridiculous things like this article is stating, they are diversified everywhere and the complexity seems beneficial to their bottom dollar.

    The rumor is the coffee lake 6 core desktop processor won't work in the existing z170/270 chipset, despite the fact it's basically the same family as the last 2 CPUs for those boards (i7-6700 / i7-7700 etc) just 2 more cores 'glued on'
    We also don't know if this new processor was ever intended to come out at 14nm or it was originally 10nm.
    There's talk that the new chipset, Z370 isn't even any more than a re-badge of the z270! Which makes forcing people to use it even more ridiculous.
    There's a "z390" (?) is a cannonlake chipset or "PCH" - and it's coming out next year - but that chipset is only for cannonlake processors, except there are (apparently) none of those planned for desktop.

    So, do you buy an i7-8700k now and put it on a z370, knowing that you might be missing out on some new features in 2018, like bluetooth 5 and wifi ac being built into the chipset itself?

    The whole thing is messy and awkward to follow, it's only gotten worse the past few years.
    Honestly, I think the best thing to do, if you're capable is to stop reading the news about this stuff and just buy what's best when you need a new machine. It's endlessly time consuming and confusing to be an educated consumer with PC stuff. (I should know, I've wasted possibly years of my life googling / reading this rubbish since I first started building my own machines 20 years ago)

    But the long and short of it is, stuff just isn't improving at a fantastic rate anymore. Even if you're silly rich, you can't buy a machine that utterly decimates other machines easily. People can get 60 to 80% of your performance for 1/4 or less.

    1. Re:It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      The delay in shift from 14nm to 10nm has been pretty bad across the industry, in fact considering the performance improvements for processors, GPUs over the past 7 years, it seems quite apparent that the manufacturing process still plays a very heavy part in the performance boost between generations, just as much as architectural design of the processor.

      AMD went from 22nm everything, to both 14nm and 10nm ... this year.

      The only company delayed on 10nm is Intel. Their specialized 3D "Tri-Gate" transistors apparently can't be produced economically at 10nm. Intel has just back-peddled back to working with regular old FinFET's like the rest of the industry. They are late to the 14nm FinFET game so its still going to be another year before Intel figures out how to do 10nm FinFET's like the 3 other companies that heave already beaten them to 10nm production.

      These Ryzen CPU's are all still 14nm, with only the console chips (so far) getting the 10nm treatment.

      Intel is FUCKED, and its partly because they chased 10nm Tri-Gates, but mostly its because their vertical business model is now very harmful to them as they dont know how to keep previous gen fabs busy making money 24/7.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      It seems improving means better phones with better battery life. PCs are booring like how kids in the 1980s snubbed their noses at Mainframes and DECs even though nerds at that time debated big iron and mainframes were the wave of the future and cool etc.

      It seems crappy no name phones can last for many days without a recharge. Not same with heavy smart phones.

      More transistors due jack with the x86 which is why INtel and AMD are trying cores. Intel gave up on this as they are afraid once people upgrade to a faster CPU they won't upgrade again. They had an internal 80 core x86 for graphics but cancelled it to preserve sales since they no longer have competition.

      AMD may put this back as finally a $3000 desktop can compete with a cell phone (my Nexus 6P has more cores than the i7 I am typing this on which is ridiculous )

      What is getting ahead is fast storage but they are all illegally colluding to raise prices together claiming we are busy switching to 3drand ... for the past 2 years. Hard drive makers did this for 2 years after that flood in Thailand and now are doing the same iwth SSD to keep prices high. Once the government stops them and they compete we will see reason to upgrade with USB type C and faster SSDs with more storage.

    3. Re:It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by lexman098 · · Score: 1

      So, do you buy an i7-8700k now and put it on a z370, knowing that you might be missing out on some new features in 2018, like bluetooth 5 and wifi ac being built into the chipset itself?

      Yes. Dongles are cheap and effective.

      Honestly, I think the best thing to do, if you're capable is to stop reading the news about this stuff and just buy what's best when you need a new machine.

      I agree completely.

    4. Re:It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel bet a lot on the mobile market. They knew the PC market was drying up so they tried to diversify and abandon their more traditional market. They were never really able to secure a place in that space because they were late to the game. They're not innovating any more and these days its all about playing catch-up to the ones that actually are. Now that the cheap mobile market has become over-saturated It's not surprising they're trying to resurrect old sources of revenue.

      Source: Worked in the Intel mobile division

    5. Re:It's all a horrific mess for nerds. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We are in a bad bad timeline for hardcore and even regular PC enthusiasts\

      Maybe, if what you mean by "PC enthusiasts" is the group of people who buy new hardware just to brag that they have the latest and greatest. For people who actually use their machines for real work or even gaming, this is a golden age. We used to upgrade because we were always waiting for our machines to finish doing something. Now our machines wait for us.

  20. Upgrade Core i7 920? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nah, I'll wait.

    1. Re:Upgrade Core i7 920? by avandesande · · Score: 1

      my 950 rocks after upgraded to ssd

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
  21. Re: Thanks Obama by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're wrong. Bannon and pals will impose their segregationist ways on Trump who will make all motherboards and CPUs live separate but equal lives. The evangelicals will insist that a CPU and motherboard must stay together for life - though you're allowed to upgrade if one of them dies.

  22. I don't care by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

    I'm still waiting for quad-core Arduino ATmega328P.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  23. In recently remembered history. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Socket 7 stuck around for 3-5 years. Slot 1 was a bit shorter, but it was pin compatible with Socket 370 if you could get converters. Socket 370 stuck around until Intel sued its last remaining compatible clone, which was VIA technologies, leading to VIA no longer producing Intel pinned CPU chips (there was a big lawsuit over it. VIA's 478 pin chips might have been P4 compatible using a non-traditional pin layout, as I believe their later 370 pin EPIA soldered down chips were.)

    Intel's intentional incompatibility is personally responsible for every socket change since Socket 8. (Socket 8 to SLOT1 to Socket 370 was due to an inability to get faster clocked cache RAM to package internally to the CPUs, leading to cpus with only L1 cache and off-package cache RAM on the SLOT1/2 card. AMD did the same thing that generation since Intel wouldn't license the SLOT-1 format/bus to them.) This is precisely what lead to the loss of numerous motherboard and chipset design companies in the mid to late 90s and resulting in a per-vendor monoculture by the late 2000s (Socket 775 being the last independent motherboards for Intel, with VIA, ATI, and Nvidia producing chipsets, and I believe similiar on the AMD side, before becoming essentially one vendor each with the Intel chips on the Intel side, and AMD on the AMD side (with a few straggling Nvidia chipsets making it onto AM2+/AM3 motherboards, possible even a few AM3+ compatible boards since the split pane power supply didn't require direct chipset support.)

    The biggest period of churn for Intel CPUs was the late 80s to early 90s when they went through sockets 3-7 for the 486/Pentium, prior to that package changes were only made out of necessity, whether increases in i/o related pins, or instability due to insufficient power/ground pin pairs. Additionally they used to be required to be second sourced for military and other contracts, which is how we eventually ended up with the huge and diverse hardware ecosystem that made the 90s *THE* time to kitbash x86 computer systems.

  24. I upgrade DRAM generations.. BANDWIDTH by WittyName · · Score: 2

    I upgrade for each new generation of memory. I will soon upgrade to a DDR4 based system.

    Wait for the new standard to hit price parity, then grab whatever CPU is at the best price/performance point. New faster PCI or whatever, sure. Give me the new fast RAM!

    All computing comes down to bandwidth. Memory bandwidth is always the first roadblock. Then disk, and later network.

    Yes, about every 4-5 years. Shrug, works for me!

    SSD was my only upgrade in about 4 years!

    --
    The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
    1. Re:I upgrade DRAM generations.. BANDWIDTH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Second this. I have switched systems as follows: EDO RAM (Cyrix) -> PC100 (Pentium II) -> DDR (Athlon XP)-> DDR2 (Athlon 64 X2, Phenom or the like) -> DDR3 (AMD A10) and will get DDR4 when Zen 2 with on die graphics is released in a couple of years.

      Laptops are another matter, have had 3 or 4, get whatever is at around $600 as lightweight and silent as possible, currently an Asus Zenbook UX305.

      I'm not a heavy gamer and nowadays just require something good enough for fast compile times for my projects, which hasn't required an upgrade specifically for that (DDR2 generation would work fine today!), but I just want to have a new toy sometimes.

    2. Re:I upgrade DRAM generations.. BANDWIDTH by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Got a NVIDIA 1080 and all is good.
      4K and new CPU needs will be the next question.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    3. Re:I upgrade DRAM generations.. BANDWIDTH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Wait for the new standard to hit price parity, then grab whatever CPU is at the best price/performance point. New faster PCI or whatever, sure.

      Then you might be waiting a while, DDR4 prices bottomed out last summer (2016) and have been rising ever since then. Prices are predicted to stay high until at least the end of 2017 due to the memory manufacturers migrating to new nodes.

      > Give me the new fast RAM!

      I don't know your use case, but unless you're doing heavy scientific computing or massive in-memory data processing, I doubt the main benefit of a new generation of memory is the speed. The gain between generations is almost always in the doubling of density (on the consumer side: DDR1 -> 1GB/DIMM, DDR2 -> 4GB/DIMM, DDR3 -> 8GB/DIMM, DDR4 -> 16GB/DIMM) which means you can double the RAM in a system with the same number of slots.

      So your laptop with 16GB? Well the new one can take 32GB. Developers love more RAM because it means they don't have to spend any time optimising their code, and consumers love it because everything runs faster.

  25. Why same socket then? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Why same socket then?

    They need to add more pci-e lanes / boost the DMI link speed. Just going to 6 cores at the top end seems like an other kaby lake x joke.

    AMD is killing them and AMD has more pci-e lanes at all levels (other then maybe an 4 cpu Intel system that cost will be way higher at least X2 or more then an good amd server system)

  26. IF they added more pci-e in a new socket then it's by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    IF they added more pci-e in a new socket then it's not so bad more like it's about time they moved off of LGA 1151 / 1150 they are just about the same in number of pci-e lanes / ram channels.

  27. Re: hurrr durrr I'm a GNOME developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ftfy

  28. Why This Matters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "We've been building desktop systems for less than 5 years and don't have a access to memories that would tell us how normal this was, just a generation or two ago. Besides, they're just products, technological development is arbitrary, at least linear and definitely guaranteed."

    I just come here to alternate between feeling guilty for feeling superior and crying into my hands at peoples' estimation of others' intelligence.

  29. Intel has lost its way by hyades1 · · Score: 1

    Intel is thrashing around. They've moved from "you want our stuff because it's the best" to, "you're going to buy our stuff because we'll make deals with people you buy computers from". That's not well described, and I'm not an expert (my computing needs are modest) but I've seen this happen before with other tech and non-tech companies. They get big and powerful, and they forget it was willing buyers who made them that way. As far as I'm concerned, you can put me down as a default AMD customer for my next upgrade. I will stay away from Intel until I see some sign that they've remembered the customer comes first. I currently own three computers, two with Intel processors, one with AMD. One I built from components, the other two have been upgraded one way or another...more RAM, SSD drives, better power supply, etc.

    It's about time for me to retire the oldest computer and replace my everyday one with something better. Normally, I'd have looked at both AMD and Intel for my upgrade/replacement. Not anymore.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
    1. Re:Intel has lost its way by Dunbal · · Score: 1

      They get big and powerful, and they forget it was willing buyers who made them that way.

      This is typical of most large businesses. They get big and powerful and most of the people who got them there cash out and move on to other things or retire. A bunch of MBA's who have never learned how to actually make money are hired. Nepotism and cronyism take hold, and management goes from a staff of competent people to a staff of sycophants, brown nosers and yes men/women. And eventually the golden goose is dead and butchered

      Large corporations are part of the death cycle of business. Usually some of them manage to hang on because they use their influence to carve out a monopoly for themselves and then we're stuck with these zombies that piss money away, give us shitty service and yet refuse to go bankrupt. Others survive for a while by eating their competitors through mergers and acquisitions, all the while keeping their eyes firmly on that oh so sweet monopoly - rewriting laws if they have to. But in the natural order of things, these businesses should go spectacularly bankrupt.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:Intel has lost its way by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Intel is preferred still where gamers rejected Ryzen for i7's and even the older FX series! AMD's marketshare plummets as soon as Ryzen comes out :-(

      So I think Intel must be doing something right as gamers feel AMD sucks for games and has a bad brand name attached compared to Intel/Nvidia.

    3. Re:Intel has lost its way by hyades1 · · Score: 1

      Great analysis. Wish I could disagree, but I really can't.

      --
      I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  30. Backdoors: The end of Intel and AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Intel and AMD don't realize, apparently, that allowing backdoor spyware means the eventual end of their companies.

    The secret agencies of the U.S. government don't know or don't care that their secret, often badly-managed, activities cause people to avoid buying U.S. products.

    When an organization has secrecy, good management is not necessary because bad management is not detectable.

    1. Re:Backdoors: The end of Intel and AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Their demise means that they will be replaced by other manufacturers that will implement backdoors controlled by other states (think China...)

    2. Re:Backdoors: The end of Intel and AMD by yuvcifjt · · Score: 1

      Intel and AMD don't realize, apparently, that allowing backdoor spyware means the eventual end of their companies.

      No, they realise very well, and that there's no other competitor besides them, especially if you go down the Windows route.

      Consumers have no other choice, and especially coupled with the fact very few people appear to truly care about their privacy... you only have to look at the countless Android and Google users to realise how little people (even geeks) seem to care!

      * I didn't mention Apple, because they are the only major company who appear to care for the privacy of their users and fighting against Gov surveillance.

  31. There's Likely a Legitimate Technical Reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The most likely reason they are introducing a new socket + chipset instead of reusing the older Kaby Lake one is power delivery. All the Kaby Lake boards had their Voltage Regulator networks designed to accommodate dual and quad core CPUs. It would not be at all surprising if the max Vcore current on these new six-core parts is higher than the quad core parts. Since Intel can't retroactively patch old motherboard's VR networks, they are just introducing a one or two pin socket change to differentiate between the old and the new.

    I honestly like this approach a bit better than AMD's... you always know that all LGA CPUs will work in all motherboards with that socket. No need to check if your AM3+ socket mobo is new enough to work with the new AM4 CPUs instead of the old ones. Also, no problems with getting a board that will work with the new CPUs in theory... but is unable to boot up with a new CPU until the BIOS is updated... but how do you update the BIOS if you don't have an older CPU to boot the board and run the update utility?

    1. Re:There's Likely a Legitimate Technical Reason by mrfaithful · · Score: 1

      Also, no problems with getting a board that will work with the new CPUs in theory... but is unable to boot up with a new CPU until the BIOS is updated... but how do you update the BIOS if you don't have an older CPU to boot the board and run the update utility?

      Happens with intel sockets too. The board I'm using now technically supports ivy bridge but only with a firmware upgrade. The board you buy during the transition could easily be old stock. A decent reseller would know to pick the new stock if you buy a new CPU at the same time, but amazon you get what the computer says to pick.

  32. That probably came off as teaching an old dog by dbIII · · Score: 1

    That probably came off as teaching an old dog - you know all of that stuff - my post was really just addressing the situation of a single fast core running a single thread versus multiple cores - less relevant than it used to be but some stuff still pegs a CPU at 100% leaving the user to wait around and doesn't have another thread when it can.
    Now that the average software developer has finally grasped 64 bit and is starting to get a feel for multiple threads that difficult problem will be chipped away at a bit at a time, just as it has been in fields were software developers have had multiple CPUs since the 1990s.

    1. Re:That probably came off as teaching an old dog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sure the fully-scalable game engine that you're creating with all this deep knowledge will shock the world.

  33. Well done Intel. by Dunbal · · Score: 1

    Intel just keeps giving me more and more reasons to make sure my next CPU purchase in AMD. Add another one to the pile. Well done, Intel.

    --
    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  34. Nothing new by zmooc · · Score: 1

    Intel has always been doing this. However, I'm not so sure the upgrade problem is that much of a problem in real life.

    I always build my own PCs and typically go for the best performance-per-euro solution. I have often looked into upgrades, but hardly ever were such impossible-due-to-socket-changes-upgrades really worth it from a performance-per-euro point of view. It's almost always a better idea to save your money and buy a new cpu+ram+mobo combo a year later than to upgrade now.

    Upgrading might be interesting if you bought crap in the first place (e.g. Celeron or Pentium) but you should not buy these things to begin with.

    I do often upgrade, though, but that's invariably through recombining second hand hardware. Otherwise it's just not worth the trouble.

    --
    0x or or snor perron?!
  35. As opposed to AMD by DrYak · · Score: 1

    They're saying not compatible. What this likely means is a change in pin layout.

    As opposed to AMD's "AM#" motherboard which more or less have compatible pinouts,
    and are generally within a firmware upgrade away from supporting next generation's CPUs on previous generation's motherboards (though lacking support for the feature introduced with the newest "AM#" platform).

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  36. Re: hurrr durrr I'm a Hosts File Engine developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *rolls in pig shit*

    FTFY

  37. Story was clearly written by an AMD fan... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The logic of the article doesn't follow: Users can't upgrade and so they will jump ship to AMD where they have to, you guessed it, replace their motherboard anyway because AMD motherboards are completely different from Intel motherboards - even the CPU sockets are different! The only rational explanation is the story was written by an AMD fan and/or company representative.

  38. Civ6 issues by unixisc · · Score: 1

    My biggest issue w/ Civ6 is how constrained it has been. In previous versions of the game - aside from I & II, you could name your leader, your civilization, your cities. Civ 4 was the best - they had a scenario editor where you could start all the players you wanted in certain spots, preload them w/ whatever units, money, cities & resources you wanted, including renaming anything right from the base game, and then play. In Civ V, there never was a scenario editor: the closest to it was a mod called IGE (in-game editor), which was buggy: if one wants to do True Starting Locations on a map, one can't do that w/ enemy units.

    But Civ 6 is even worse. You can't rename your leader, you can't rename your tribe: you have to depend on other people having already released mods, and the Civ 6 people have been horrible about releasing any scenario editors. And a number of the mods are pretty buggy, and won't allow a game to start if they are enabled. As for the length of the game, the way I've gotten around it somewhat has been to play a game up to a point, save, resume another day from that point and so on.

  39. Serious mistake by shaitand · · Score: 1

    Intel is likely looking at this in terms of market size, potential income, etc. That's like using only technical analysis (looking exclusively at the random charts trying to find patterns in the noise) for your stock trades.

    The people they are talking about are the more technically proficient users among consumers, their perceptions of the superiority of one platform vs another are what drive the decisions everyone else makes and repeats to those who think they are the "technical guy" and it spreads from there... if that consensus lasts for 2-3 years in AMD's favor the consumer market will have shifted by at least 60%. Right now AMD has the technically superior platform both on the consumer side AND the server side (which is a first for them) not only are their chips faster, they are also cheaper. If they can largely maintain that for 3 years, and can at least maintain parity for another 2-4 years beyond that they will have made a similar dent in the server market where the real money is. Intel's methods for calculating TDP result in lower numbers vs average power actually consumed than those of AMD, if AMD picks up on this trick and begins using a comparable TDP calculation Intel will be at serious risk.

    That should scare the crap out of intel. AMD has had a massive almost cult-like mindshare among this class of users who remember well when AMD was on top and how much nicer it was to interact with AMD culture than Intel's, this type of user has been silently lurking waiting to pounce on the opportunity to praise AMD again. These are technical users, they haven't denied Intel has ruled the processing platform since the core 2 duo but AMD similarly owned the market while Intel milked higher priced and slower Pentium II/III/IV chips for years counting on their brand and server market clout prior to that. A fundamental AMD architecture revamp that puts them in the lead is just what many have been certain would happen eventually.

    P.S. Ignorant people who traded AMD stock down to $2/share with intel at $55/share, the earnings potential was never that significant regardless of the current marketshare of Intel. Analyst look at AMD "growth" to $13-14/share in the past year and freak out about the "bubble", that isn't a bubble, it is a partial market correction recognizing the potential of the brand. Everyone I know making recommendations in the Enterprise space was shocked at that discrepancy and most recognized the opportunity and purchased AMD stock when they saw how underpriced it was before AMD even announced it's new architecture. It was always just a matter of time before AMD released an update ahead of Intel and we all buy the superior technology at purchase time.

    P.S.S. We were mining bitcoin with AMD GPUs six years ago... congrats stock market drones on discovering this after mining had already moved on to custom ASICs years before and trading on the news as if it were just happening today.

  40. different socket is okay Only with more pci-e or b by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    different socket is okay Only with more pci-e or better DMI. Not just 1152 or 1151B that just locks out the older boards.

  41. Much FUD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "If consumers are forced to dump an existing Z270 motherboard for a newer Z370 to get a six-core Coffee Lake CPU, Intel risks driving them into the arms of AMD and its Ryzen CPUs."

    you know...."forcing" them to buy a new processor and motherboard... ...which likely won't be compatible with all new AMD processors down the road..

    lol

  42. MMmmm boy, cake. by Sperbels · · Score: 1

    Sorry Intel, but I can't not read that as Coffee Cake CPU.

  43. Why this doesn't matter by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    "The vast majority of new CPU sales are in new systems, and they likely won't be impacted by the incompatibility."

    In short; it doesn't actually matter.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  44. intel locked out nvida from making chipsets for in by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    intel locked out nvida from making chipsets for intel cpus.

    nvidia ion had good video.

  45. and an AMD system at half the cost will have the s by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    and an AMD system at half the cost will have the same power with more pci-e lanes.

  46. AMD next socket change will be for PCI-E 4.0 by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    AMD next socket change will be for PCI-E 4.0.

  47. If consumers are forced to dump an existing Z270? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Those poor consumers my heart bleeds for them.

  48. Socket 5 CPU can be placed in a Socket 7 motherboa by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    also Socket 5 CPU can be placed in a Socket 7 motherboard.

    later there was an Super Socket 7 that worked with older cups and new Super Socket 7 cpus would work in Socket 7 boards at lower speeds.

  49. Re: hurrr durrr I'm creimer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the pig that rolls around in his own piss and shit

    Ftfy

  50. Re:intel locked out nvida from making chipsets for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At the time I wanted a motherboard with Geforce 8200 chipset for AMD CPUs, and they stopped making these.

    You still can buy a motherboard with geforce 7025, which is a renamed geforce 6150 chipset. Updated with support for FX AM3+ CPUs. But a geforce 6 is less desirable than a geforce 8.
    I did have a 8400GS eventually (PCIe graphics card), then another. I got what I wanted, geforce 8 had perfect texture filtering for my old games. But they died due to the lead-free solder problem.

    Geforce 6100/6150/7025 has had a 11-year run! AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+ sockets just required the chipset speak Hypertransport and so it was possible to use the same chipset for a decade.
    You can go geforce 7025 + FX 8320E and 16GB RAM if you don't want UEFI and security processor, at the cost of higher power use than Intel or modern AMD platforms. The power use also affects reliability - don't use a 125 watt processor, if possible get the best motherboard with geforce 7025 or AMD 760G that you can find, make sure the VRMs have good airflow or add heatsinks to them.
    I hope this can make my post not useless. If you have a paranoid requirement about backdoored "security" processor, have a look at nvidia chipset + AMD CPU!

  51. Re:and an AMD system at half the cost will have th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The $10K and more CPUs will go into 4-socket and 8-socket systems whereas the new AMD is 2-socket only (but with a ton of I/O and RAM so it's an apt replacement for an older 4-socket system)

    The "Platinum" is for what IBM called "midrange computers" i.e. the market of Itanium, POWER and Sparc. Formerly they had the Nehalem-EX and successors for the same use, Xeon E7 family. Same thing but they had a different socket than mainstream Xeon E5.

    We mostly don't need these things but if anything, perhaps they will have more availability as standalone motherboard and CPU retail parts so if you really need 3TB or 6TB memory on a single system instead of 1TB or 2TB, it could be possible.

  52. Re:Upgrading CPUs?When the core2duo came out, I go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Did you underclock that Q6600? I have a "shitty" dual core AMD and ended up doing that, even though it's doesn't use very much power (it's similar to a mid range core 2 duo in power and power)

    Now it runs at 1.1 volt or something when loaded up.
    This is a good for lazyness - I don't have to fix the cooling and I won't be shamed into buying a newer more power efficient system.
    So I recommend doing this and you'll be doing as good or better than the idiots who think they're saving the planet by buying a new applebook mac or a hybrid car.

  53. Makes no sense. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So because intel wants to have their next chip have more pins to facilitate better chips, it will make builds get mad that they can't use their existing motherboards. Which in turn will make them not go with Intel but with AMD, which means they would have to get new motherboards anyway?

  54. thiet ke nha pho by neohouse · · Score: 1
    --
    https://neohouse.vn/
  55. Old news? by Lost+Penguin · · Score: 1

    I had coffee laked motherboards 10 years ago, they weren't compatible with anything afterwards, and only made blue smoke.

    --
    I am the unwilling control for my Origin.