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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Cost saving would've been to get rid of the IHS entirely. Their mobile chips work fine without them, I don't really understand why they're a thing for desktop processors.

AMD uses them too, so there must be a reason... is it because they're afraid of improper installation breaking them? That's on the user.

The weight of the desktop heatsinks? Small changes to latch design should suffice. Or you can have a metal spacer around the chip with the die exposed, kinda like GPUs do.

I've replaced many laptop chips and even ran some on desktops with no issues.

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> is it because they're afraid of improper installation breaking them?

Yes. This was an issue back in the Athlon Thunderbird days.

"It's on the user" doesn't work as an argument when all of your large desktop/server OEMs notice a large uptick in failure rate post-assembly.

Looking back it seems so barbaric.

I remember how they briefly tried those black foam sticker pads in the corners of the substrate before acquiescing and using the IHS.

At some point they realized they could do better than a heatsink mounting system that involved trying to balance a heavy metal object on a small pedestal while trying to hook a tensioned spring to a clip you couldn't see by exerting tremendous downward force with a flathead screwdriver. I guess those motherboard return rates finally got to them.

Only as barbaric as the ~50dB, 4krpm tiny fans on enthusiast coolers in those days.

I always wondered why that mounting mechanism even existed. Would've thought it would get scrapped on the drawing board but maybe no one in the design pipeline ever put a screwdriver through their motherboard.

It was probably all part of Intel's strategy to sell more chips. It's hard to repair a gouged motherboard and not worth the time to recover the chips soldered into it. After the introduction of the IHS and new cooling solutions the motherboard market became unprofitable, that's why Intel had to exit it. /s

I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I heard that there were also issues that could arise more easily with electrically conductive thermal paste and that there was essentially fraud going on where lower end SKUs were being passed off as higher end units. That being said, that seems like something that would only affect the consumer used market.

> Cost saving would've been to get rid of the IHS entirely.

The IHS itself is a cost saving measure.

When Intel and AMD first introduced flip chips, they didn't have the IHS and the heatsink was balanced on top while you tensioned a spring. If you rocked the heatsink in any direction you would (not could) crush an edge or corner of the chip and likely kill the CPU.

The IHS protected the chip and reduced the failure/return rate.

Desktop cooler: https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2018/...

Laptop cooler: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/4h3FmQQNHsITcHTq.med...

nVidia GPU: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/quadro-4000m.c1428

> Cost saving would've been to get rid of the IHS entirely. Their mobile chips work fine without them, I don't really understand why they're a thing for desktop processors.

Because there's a huge difference between running 5watts sustained through something the size of your fingernail, and 100 watts sustained. That heat has to go somewhere and there's 20x more of it on a desktop part, as it requires way more integrated cooling to not immediately thermally throttle.

The IHS is needed to prevent the die from, hence RMA.

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