Intel plans to make your motherboard and CPU a into single part.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/like-it-or-not-nonreplaceable-cpus-may-be-the-future-of-desktops/
Well, this ought to simplify the system build threads. Too bad it also guts consumer choice as well.
Well, this ought to simplify the system build threads. Too bad it also guts consumer choice as well.
Replies
Yeah CPU upgrades are so rare, its almost always a poor economic choice when doing it. IE: upgrading to the 10-20% faster cpu that your mobo supports usually costs about the same as a brand new processor that may be 2-3x as fast.
I doubt OEMs make a lot of margin on a £260 laptop like mine, and if suddenly that's all people buy a large amount of income just went out the window. Even my laptop had some crippleware on it before I installed a new copy of Windows to clean off the junk, such as a touchpad driver that made the multitouch touchpad work like a single touch.
I guess alternatively they could just disallow against the use of upgrades on hardware that can't comfortably support them, but Intel probably wouldn't be happy with that as it's "free cash" to them.
As someone who typically purchases future proofed (within reason) mobos, and who just upgraded their processor only... I have to disagree.
So we're just stuck with Intel only mobos, if they go with this? They're essentially telling any builder "Hey, I hear AMD allows you to have choices... I mean, they're already at a cheaper price point than us for comparable chipsets."
This is a terrible idea for consumers and a terrible business plan for Intel.
Your CPU must be quite old if it still has pins
AMD use pins across all of their current CPUs AFAIK. When I disassembled a dead laptop for parts a few years ago even that had a socketed CPU.
Sockets in laptops are quite rare though - I know IBM socketed their Thinkpad CPUs however and a few people even upgraded their Thinkpads with newer Core CPUs. Became especially popular from Core to Core 2 chips which could run 64 bit software.
I only upgraded CPUs in one PC which was a Dual Pentium II machine, which also took PIIIs. Otherwise I couldn't be bothered. Either the new CPUs were too fast and the mobo couldn't keep up with the bus frequence, or they used a newer RAM standard or USB 2 came out...there's almost always been a reason for me to upgrade everything together.
I think it more unpractical though to have mobo + CPU combined for shops that sell parts.
Edit: forgot I also swapped my original Pentium for a replacement as it had the "Pentium bug"...anyone remember that?
Good article, mainly interested in using 1 top tier cpu and locknig it down for lower models that way if you ever want to upgrade you just purchase the firmware and off you go. Interesting
And no EQ, its still cheaper to upgrade your cpu than buy a new system to support a newer chip layout. Also older chips are cheaper, not the same price. Aaaaand you then have the whole secondary market of used processors.
The only thing that gets more expensive comparatively new, are older memory configs.
Edit: Are you sure you all who are for or don't see the big deal aren't mac users? ;)
Our entire economy, rooted in population growth and inflation, is environmentally unsustainable.
When was the last time you or anyone you know bent a mb socket pin? As it is the newer gens dont use straight up pins in the traditional sense.
::
Fwiw I have upgraded laptops cpus.
And this helps how? Dont know if you have heard the latest but the more doomsayer scientists are coming up heads. The temperature is on track to rise 7 degrees F by 2100.
OT, I know, but its really bumming me out. And trying to figure out why would anyone want to have kids where their future looks bleak. There is even a new study suggesting our kids life expectancy will be lower than ours.
I remember saying that to my friend the summer after I finished middle school and got a brand-spankin'-new PIII 500. Y'know, the Slot 1 CPUs.
Man, everything old IS new again! :poly142:
Spending $200 on a new cpu to get a 10% boost in performance is simply not economical. Upgrading your ram/cpu/mobo for $400-500(and keeping the rest of your system) while getting a significant boost in performance makes a whole lot more sense.
Unless of course you buy low end at the beginning of a product cycle and then upgrade 3-6 months down the road, but why would you do that in the first place?
Even if the price of a new cpu/ram/mobo is higher than the cost of a new or used legacy cpu, that dosen't mean it presents a solid value. There is a big difference between value and straight cost.
Anyway, I think this sort of thing is targeted more to the mainstream who buys a brand new computer every time they upgrade, not so much the hard core enthusiast who upgrades cpus and things like that. For the vast majority of people having abundance of choice with cpu/mobo combinations is something they doesn't even factor into the equation.
Removing choice is always a bad thing, and this is really bad, imo.
I wouldn't be surprised if its some kind of dealing between microsoft and intel, so we can get our boxes consolized. :P
Also OT: I wouldn't say it looks bleak, just very different. A world without growth would be a completely different society. Population growth is already slowing down, just not enough, and the one-child-policy, while controversial, might be necessary soon.
We might come out the other side a better species, we can hope.
My point was (sorry for being vague) that I'm honestly not sure soldering a BGA IC to a motherboard is much worse than using a socket. You save a lot on building the socket and can install the IC as part of the pick and place process, probably saving energy. The number of people who actually recycle computers at this stage is absolutely minimal. I've known (idiots) who bin it the moment it becomes slow.
EDIT: if you overthink it enough, saving money of any kind is actually detrimental to the economy as less money spent = less money in the economy. If I improve my product to require half as many components I just made half as much work for the producer of those components. To bring this on topic for games, tools that makes 3D artists' jobs easier are actually shrinking the 3D artist job market.
Upgrading is only a tiny part of how fucked this plan is.
This is already the case with consumer (dell etc) built computers. This isn't anything new. I don't think this will seriously effect the enthusiest market, this is for your mom, dad, grandma, who don't even know what a cpu is. Extreme modularity is total overkill for the vast percentage of computer users.
I really can't see a situation where intel isn't offering what we're all used to for the advanced/enthusiast computer builder.
We're going to see a shift in the mainstream to smaller, cheaper and more production line built computers, similar to what we're seeing in phones and tablets for the average user. Because this is all the average user really needs in a computer.
Yeah I really don't think that will be the case. I think we're going to continue to see smaller and less expensive computers that are cheaper to build and cost less money, to compete with tablets and similar devices. For a lot of people these days owning a large desktop computer is simply overkill.
There will continue to be business and advanced users who need more than that though, the costs for this sort of thing will probably rise(or more accurately there will be a bigger gap between the mainstream and the enthusiast, as the consumer pcs get cheaper and the advanced stuff stays at the same prices or gets slightly more expensive).
Your computer probably does this already.
I frequent pc building forums and it happens a lot. Either before the person even receives the unit, or after through human error.
Ok for the extremely small % of users out there who actually do upgrade cpus, here is some raw math for you.
I currently have a 775 Q6600 quad core intel cpu. If I want to upgrade that to something significantly faster that means I have to buy a Q9650. Cheapest price on that new is $275 on eBay. This gives me 147% of the performance of my Q6600.
On the other hand I can buy an I7 3770 for just $25 more. Lets call it $500 total once you throw in a mobo and ram. This gives me 320% the performance, which is a significant upgrade.
If we divide the performance increase by money spent we get these two numbers:
Q9650 uprade = 0.53
I7 + mobo/ram = 0.64
I think most reasonable people would define value as performance for price, so the I7 is clearly a better value. Even if it is a higher initial cost, this is basic economics. If you go through life always buying the least expensive item in the short term, you will pay a lot more in the long term. Even though the Q9650 upgrade option is initially cheaper, the smaller performance increase means I'm going to have to upgrade much sooner, and I will spend more money doing so. Economics.
This isn't a unique situation or anything either, this has been my experience for every computer I've built for myself or others in the last 15 years. Its rarely a good value to upgrade your cpu.
q6600 - 2953
q9650 - 4365
i7 3770 - 9460
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
Now, for the hippy social conscience aspects of all of this. Say you upgrade your cpu, what are you left with? A useless used cpu. You can sell it on ebay I guess.
Uprade your ram/cpu/mobo and you can probably put together another complete system from spare parts(if you're the sort who does this you already have them). Which you can re-purpose as an htpc, server or other device.
Or give to your spouse
Or give to a lower income family member
Or donate to charity
This is what I typically do with older systems.
I've been building my own PC(s) for the last 8 years-ish and I can safely say that I've only had 2 MOBOs in that time with no CPU upgrade, mainly because I can make the right choices in price/performance and gut the old system for basics. This might be what Intel fear the most, like Earthquake I run a Q6600 and have been for the past 5 years, can still run all of the latest games. It's only the HDD (SSD is next) GPU and RAM that are affecting anything at the moment.
Still got 2 mobos in boxes and will probably upgrade to an i7 3770 this month, and resign my Q6600,RAM and mobo to my old PC stash which would make it 3 mobo, cpu,ram setups, although might see what it fetches on ebay because they are quality. Have thought about buying/building an arcade cabinet and having my latest setup as a standup retro button masher.
The last time i've seen CPU soldering was the 386DX. Either way the whole "it doesn't matter much" comes from Intel's bad habit of rapid obsoleting their sockets in the past 12 years. Jumping sockets and slots rarely myself, I never liked that either, and it kept me on the AMD side for so long.
This whole CPU integration would suck for troubleshooting and repair.
Personally, I'm also worried about the repairing bit. Right now if I break a CPU, I can just buy that part. Having them merged forces me to spend $50-$100 extra.
I have to agree to a degree; I've built quite a few computers over the past few years using low-mid-end boards, and in retrospect they weren't fantastic. Mine has weird state bugs (needs tilting 30 degrees to boot sometimes, doesn't always hibernate/go to sleep, sound sometimes fails, wifi sometimes shuts off and the system starts lagging) and none of them had a layout that made any sense whatsoever. USB and audio headers below the graphics card? GREAT IDEA
If the majority of Intel's business isn't enthusiasts, why bother with high end CPU's? Just get rid of them all together. Clearly, that market segment doesn't matter enough to cater to since most people buy the Dell box that just does internet and school work. We don't need bleeding edge processors when the mainstream hardware does 99% of the work we need it to do, right?
The morel likely scenario is, the enthusiast market is important and it does matter or they wouldn't bother with bleeding edge processors. These people aren't fringe. They are the people from IT industry, the games industry, the multimedia industry, VFX, hardware hobbyists, gamers, and so on. All of these people want custom, purpose-built computers that are configured to their specifications for their personal use.
The gains in reliability to be had by soldering the CPU to the motherboard would be minimal. There is little difference in reliability between a socket and a direct solder connection. What would really make a difference is heavily homogenizing the hardware choices you have so that you only have to pick from a short list of thoroughly tested and "approved" hardware configurations. I'm sorry, I don't want to sacrifice choice for marginally increased reliability. I do not want to toss my perfectly usable $300 CPU because my $150 motherboard blew a bank of capacitors.
"and be easier to support than some frankensteined abomination with parts from 40 different companies."
You must be a Mac user.
They don't intentionally design bad CPUs, what would the point be? The materials cost between making a high end or a low end, low power CPU, is utterly negligable. Maybe they'd get more dies out of a platter if they made more simplified, smaller ones, but the cost of R&Ding that chip would probably negate the savings. And what would they do with the CPUs that didn't yield properly?
If all CPUs were designed to be as powerful as the low end, it'd just become the new high end.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
Actually, all CPU's would be homogenized to a one-size-fits-all design.
macs are made up from intel processers, nvidia cards and samsung displays, i fail to see your point.
the enthusiast market is pretty dead, all those professions you mentioned make up less than 5% of the people in the world that use computers, that's a fringe market, what about all the waiters, and middle schoolers, and construction workers, and professional surfers, and smoothie makers, and grandmas, and zoologists, and breakdancers, and sea captains, and pedophiles, and pizza delivery guys, and proctologists, and civilwar reenactmenters, and sports commentators? they don't give a shit.
the reason companies like intel and nvidia cater to the enthusiast market is so they can sell them a $100 piece of hardware for $1000 and they will spend it so they can have bigger E-penises than anyone on the internet, they rarely cost more to manufacture or contain more expensive materials. Maybe you personally do not want to spend more money when just your mobo dies, but intel certainly does.
Every studio I've worked at or visited has been all Dell or HP.
Sure, whatever. You're right. I'm not going to argue with you over your opinion. Even if the enthusiast market is small, the builder market isn't. People are looking to build all sorts of custom configurations. They build HTPC's, ITX LAN boxes, NAS, home servers, you name it. Solder the CPU to the PCB and all that goes to hell. Goodbye choice.
Macs have near-zero upgradeability and you can never build your own. They are the very picture of lack of choice, thus my point.
@Justin
I'm not talking about studio machines. I'm talking about personal machines. Am I mistaken that people in the game industry build their own PC at home? IT guys? Etc. Given the number of "Help me build my PC" threads that show up in GD, I just can't believe that you guys don't build your own machines.
Yeah, virtually all established businesses are buying pre-built systems, even if they're ordering them to spec. This includes game studios, film fx, etc. Custom built is a pain in the ass when you need support/service on a large scale. Even with a company large enough to have its own tech/IT department to service workstations on site they are going to support a limited number of machines.
And again, established businesses aren't going to be upgrading cpus either, in virtually all cases they will purchase a new system entirely before upgrading a cpu.
So we're back to amateur builders/enthusiasts and custom builders, which is an extremely small segment of overall computer users.
Honestly I think you're way over-reacting here. Goodbye choice? You act is if this means everyone will be forced to use ONE cpu and that is it, take it or leave it.
Realistically more than anything this would simplify things for a lot of custom builders. If I'm building an htpc I want a simple low cost easy to use solution, cpu+mobo combination would be perfect.
I think we're likely to see continued support for the very high end of the market with what you're used to in terms of CPU combinations, its just that its completely excessive for the low-mid range of computer hardware. Tech is to the point that your average I3 or I5 is way more power than your average user even needs or takes advantage of. Still we have dozens of slight variations of those cpus... to what end?
Do you really need 40 different motherboards, all of which do basically the same function, for your budget cpu build that you use for web browsing? Sure you'll have more choice, but right now there is really an excessive amount of choice in PC hardware. Sure some nerds really love to spend months researching the best combination of hardware so they can brag about it on the internet, but your average computer user, and probably your average builder would benifit from things being a little more straight forward(even if the hardcore guys will never admit it).
Though really I wouldn't worry about it, as long as there are people willing to pay 300% the price for 33% more performance, that high end market is still going to exist.
Got any statistics? If more people are building their own machines, who? Why?
If we're going to throw around "everyone I know" I should add a web developer and a programmer I know bought off the shelf machines, partially because it has support and partially because it'd take more time researching and constructing than their time is worth.
But I wouldn't normally bother mentioning it, because the people I know are a tiny, slightly eccentric segement of the population not indicative of large scale trends. None of my friends buy a new phone every two years either but that's generally what happens with contracts.
I have a preference for a certain type of motherboard, and I have a preference for a certain type of CPU, and then there are those who don't want to fiddle around with any of that.
Then there's the CPU+GPU compo that is quite realistically being a big choice for people who don't want to choose anything either, do you see yourself in a world where this will take over?
Also, in other news: iPads and handheld computers were going to take over the PC as we already discussed
A ton of people would love easier builds, but in reality the diversity in different motherboards have come from competition and companies needing to outdo eachother or give people different choices for needs.
It parallels the mac vs windows vs linux thing, on one end you're given the comfort and ease of use, the other end you're given extreme ability to customize and build exactly what you need.
You could look at it the other way around though, there are a ton of pre-built systems with features and motherboard brands I don't really need, or the choice of CPU where many here might go for the best but I would go for something less.
You're not at the bottom of some scale where everything above it is a waste of an expense, you're right in your personal middle on a scale where there is no bottom or top.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/coolers/display/20121129135249_Cooler_Maker_Scythe_Shuts_Down_Operations.html
I think, just theory crafting here, people want computers that you can just plugin in and everything works, without having to open them up or pick individual parts.
They just cant be bothered anymore. Sure there's a few enthusiasts around but our market share is nothing compared to people who buy prebuilt hardware (most notably, macs / tablets). Desktop computers in general is a shrinking industry. Which makes me sad.
Can you explain why you think it's essential and you think you have to have specific components?
Why do we have different processor speeds for example, shouldn't the fastest be the best for everyone?
It's far from the end of the world.
You don't lose a whole lot to be honest, and if it means better, less buggy PC games because they've got less configurations to target, heck that's a plus!
Some want cheaper components, others want motherboard built to handle cooling better, others want over-clocking features, some might want something like a dual-bios.
Many don't want to make the choice, but in the end they'll just pay someone else to do that choice for them, be it HP, dell or apple.
It's the choice that's good for everyone, even if they don't want to make it, everyone wins from it anyway.
That's the least of compatibility problems, most which revolve around cpu + gpu configurations, the only solution there is still to make console games.
The trade-offs just aren't equitable, but it's pretty damn nice for Intel.
You're correct. But I would attribute this more than anything as someone said.. intel depreciating socket systems quickly. I wish my older cpus would be that overpriced.
There is nothing dirty nor wrong about having a social conscience.
What to do? Recycle it if it cannot be used for any other purpose. It does have hazardous materials in both the creation and destruction. But recycling 1 part every few years versus an entire motherboard + cpu in the same time period is night and day.