Is Intel Planning To Kill Enthusiast PCs? 1009
OceanMan7 writes "According to a story by Charlie Demerjian, a long-time hardware journalist, Intel's next generation of x86 CPUs, Broadwell, will not come in a package having pins. Hence manufacturers will have to solder it onto motherboards. That will likely seriously wound the enthusiast PC market. If Intel doesn't change their plans, the future pasture for enthusiasts looks like it will go to ARM chips or something from offshore manufacturers."
Re:Even if this was true... (Score:5, Informative)
Not only that but CPU sockets usually only work for one CPU family and aren't interchangeable. You can't but AMD's chip into Intels motherboards.
So at best you can normally replace to an equaviant CPU maybe a couple of clock cycles faster but that's it.
If your upgrading you have to replace both
Re:Even if this was true... (Score:5, Informative)
Why can't you go to ARM?
Lots of linux distros have ARM support.
Re:I just can't live without a ZIF socket. (Score:4, Informative)
Was it an Intel? AMD have always been much better, making their sockets last through a few generations. Intel seem to have a new one every time I look at CPUs, but I keep getting suckered in by their performance and AES acceleration instructions.
Re:Been headed this way for while (Score:5, Informative)
Erm, am I missing something? I've seen plenty of CPUs that just had pads on them. The socket had the pins - the clasp pushed the CPU down onto them.
No pins, and still user-replacable.
Re:AMD (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, yes. Want to overclock? Those chipsets cost more. Serial port? Do you want to spend extra to get the optical audio output, or is 2-channel analog OK? What about PCI slots, need any? How many 8 or 16x PCI-E slots do you want? Cause it costs more if you want 2 or more. Do you think you'll need 4 RAM slots or is 2 enough? Do you want to spend the extra dough to have 4 6 Gbps SATA ports or is 2 enough? Or do you want to save some more money and just have 3 Gbps ports? Do you want 8 USB 3.0 ports, or just 2? Or maybe none? All different cost structures. eSATA? RAID 5 built into the motherboard?
Yes, there's worth in shopping for a motherboard if you're an enthusiast. You're not. That's OK, but don't brush off everyone else just because we want things you don't care about.
Re:Even if this was true... (Score:2, Informative)
What you mean is, "you can't go closed source Intel apps". Despite what you say, debian (linux) runs fine on ARM. There are very few open source apps, if any, that won't compile for ARM, and if any exist I bet they are unrealistic corner cases specifically designed to demonstrate features of an Intel chip. Yet another reason to go yay! Open source!
I'm pretty keen on Intel chips: I have a passively cooled Sandy Bridge rig at home for audio recording and it's almost totally silent - the (acoustically damped) hard drives are the loudest component, but it still performs well enough to handle multi channel recording with multiple live effects processing streams per channel. But equally, I have an ARM-powered Cubox that will very soon replace my old AMD-powered MythTV box. Totally silent, 3W power consumption, poor to average CPU performance but a good enough GPU to do all the {en,de}coding I need and in a tiny form factor. Really, it's horses for courses and these days if you're bound to a CPU by your choice of app you've lost the plot. (As an enthusiast, that is - I realise that for businesses the equation is different, but then businesses aren't likely to care that their CPUs are soldered to the mainboard.)
Re:Even if this was true... (Score:5, Informative)
An "x86 app" is an app that someone has compiled for x86 and only given you the binary.
Open-source apps are not generally architecture specific. If you have source code and development tools, you can build it on whatever you like, and ARM is pretty mature in this regard. Several Linux distros have ARM ports already, including Debian and Arch, and probably Fedora, and there's a FreeBSD ARM project, also, if you're allergic to the GPL.
And there is Android, for which the OS is natively ARM, even if the app-land is Java.
This ability to mix and match software and hardware in ways not anticipated by the creators of the software or the hardware is exactly why open source is awesome.
Re:intel is... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Betteridge's Law of Headlines (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Even if this was true... (Score:2, Informative)
"Solder joints are far more reliable."
Nope, not even close, solder joints break, especially BGA solder joints, doubly so if theirs quite a bit of heating/cooling cycles going on. A PC's cpu contact area with the MB does not break unless someone actually goes through the trouble of taking the well-placed heatsink/retention module off, there is no solder joint to break, it's held in place with a shit-hoard of mechanical pressure. Even if the contact area were to be disrupted somehow (Much more common with PCI add in cards/RAM) it's easily fixed and definitely does not require a something along the lines of a bga reflow.