Intel 'preparing' to put an end to user-replaceable CPUs
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
First, it's extremely rare (in my experience, anyway) to want to upgrade the CPU of an existing machine without also upgrading the motherboard. Usually by the time CPUs have advanced far enough to justify upgrading, there's also new connectors, faster memory interfaces, etc. out as well that would require a new mobo to take advantage of. If you skip the mobo upgrade and just buy the CPU, you risk just moving the system's performance bottleneck around.
Second, installing the CPU onto the motherboard is easily the trickiest, most delicate part of building your own PC. In an age when everything else plugs together with idiot-proof plugs and sockets, CPUs still have a forest of fragile pins on the bottom that can easily be bent or broken. You also have to manually add thermal protections like fans, heat sinks, thermal paste, etc., which all require selection and installation; if the CPU came pre-installed on the mobo, you could skip all that hassle completely.
Not really - the pins have been on the socket for some time now (for Intel at least - I haven't built anything AMD for some time I'm afraid) and are much, much harder to damage. The levers on the sockets have gotten much better, as have the HSF mountpoints, and inserting a CPU and attaching the HSF has not made me feel like I'm going to break the motherboard for many years (let alone actually broken it - I can remember boards where you had to jam a screwdriver into the heatsink retention bracket and apply pressure towards the motherboard... I'm getting cold sweats just thinking about it)
> You also have to manually add thermal protections like fans, heat sinks, thermal paste, etc., which all require selection and installation
Thermal paste is optional, if the CPU and heatsink make good contact it doesn't make so much difference. You don't have to select if you buy retail boxes instead of OEM, which come with HSFs already selected for you in the box, and with thermal gunk pre-applied.
I do agree that it's rare to upgrade the CPU and not motherboard, but you could say the same thing about most of the components in my PC (I tend to upgrade all at once).
As for trickiest, most delicate part of building your own pc... honestly if you're installing the CPU into the motherboard before putting into the case, I would have to disagree with you there.
Err... it makes a massive difference. Try running your brand new Xeon workstation without TIM. Your PC will shut down or blow up within seconds of doing anything. Try living in Australia, or I guess Texas and doing CAD/rendering work or playing games in summer. If you don't have aircon you'll need aftermarket cooling or your CPU will throttle.
Intel used cheap thermal paste to stick the CPU to its heatspreader on their latest chip offerings instead of soldering it on. This is between CPU and heatspreader, not between heatspreader and heatsink. That alone caused load temperatures shot up by more than 10 degrees Celcius (18F). In addition to that I've reduced some of my friends' load temps by 30 degrees just by reapplying thermal paste properly and reseating the HSF.
All the TIM is meant to do is fill in the microscopic gaps between the heatsink base and the top of the CPU, so it fills in the gaps where air would otherwise be. However, with a decently smooth HS and CPU, there should be a lot of direct contact between the two surfaces, and metal <-> metal transfers heat better than metal <-> thermal goo <-> metal.
If you were able to get a 30 degree drop then they probably either had far too much TIM on, or the heatsink was not making good contact with the CPU.
However, this all said, I think I have now disproven my point that the CPU is not the most complex part of building a system (not that it being integrated into the motherboard will make heatsink selection & attachment any easier).
Having built all my machines w/AMD cpu's I'll say that bent pins can be common, at least enough to justify taking care when installing the cpu on the mobo. To supplement, I've bent a couple myself, and have helped a couple friends straighten some of theirs out as well. They're not that hard to bend.
For the motherboard manufacturer, they'll need to buy CPUs and estimate the relative demand of each, instead of leaving that to the consumer or OEM.
Which is impractical, so the net result is fewer motherboard to choose from.
First, if one part fails (which is not extremely rare) you'll have to replace both parts.
Second, you'll still have to deal with thermal protections like hsfs, thermal paste, etc. You will not have to skip all that hassle and can still damage the CPU.
You're not saving much effort, will have less options when putting the PC together, will likely pay more, and the toughest parts of putting together a PC will still be present.
Installing the cooler can be much more tricky depending on the retention system. Pre-installing them could have a number of benefits. But it'd be a shame to lose the ability to chose your own cooling system, more so than having the CPU soldered on, in a way.
Otherwise, one has to feel that this is just another battle in the "War on General Purpose Computing". Sure, PCs will - for now - remain "general purpose" computing devices, but you have to consider this one more step down the path of locking them down, and making them less accessible and hackable.
This is completely incorrect. They could solder all the CPUs, but you can absolutely socket BGA chips. Are there any indications that they're going non-upgradable outside of the switch to BGA?
Eh, not really. Well, you can, but it's ugly, expensive, and usually only done for test fixtures and such.
Also, sockets in general are perennial problem areas for signal integrity and EMC.
It is probably best to think of the motherboard as a monolithic hunk of material, going forward. Too many reasons for the trend to go in that direction.
I hope Intel doesn't go the socket-less route. This seems like it would alienate the Linux server market for high-reliability servers that depend on CPU hot-plugging. Perhaps this only applies to the consumer market?
Right now, most computer users grab the cheapest motherboard that will work for them, and one of the places they spend extra cash is splurging on more CPU than they need. Now, motherboard makers will be able to pair the faster-stepping CPUs with 'markup' motherboards and capture a lot of that windfall to themselves, no? Doesn't this price-insensitive enthusiast market send a lot of cash Intel's way?
Maybe Intel is worried about the health of x64 white box component makers and is intentionally sending them a windfall?
Still, it's kind of an annoyance just because the form factor of the computer is still so closely tied to the motherboard, even if the board itself is trivial. Are they going to get a ton smaller and just be CPU+RAM with cable ports for PCIe/USB busses?
I expect that Intel will do what AMD and Nvidia are doing presently with GPUs, and what they used to do with their chipsets: Sell the CPUs into the various motherboard manufacturers, and let them sell the complete package to the consumer. They can implement any form factors they like.
Of course with a sufficiently punitive contract that Intel retains control of everything.
pci-e 2.0 x32 is 16gb/s. thunderbolt is 2.5gb/s
Maybe the market is stagnant because there really is no need to upgrade. I have a 2009 macbook pro and it's fine. In the late 90's early 2000's I wouldn't go more than 1-2 yeara without an upgrade. I still use an AMD Phenom in my desktop, though I may build a new machine just because of gaming. Nothing is really pushing the limits of modern hardware. Most software is moving to the web and doesn't require the latest processor to run.
As one example my parents upgraded from their Windows PC to an iPad.
In this new model, Intel will be unable to simply new ship chips to distributors to go to system builders. They'll have to ship all their CPUs to "the land where things are soldered" (Asia, presumably) and ship everything back again.
I think AMD may have just been given a gift of 6 weeks.
1. Waste. If some component on your motherboard goes, you're on the hook for a new CPU (and vice versa). This seems tremendously wasteful. Maybe bigger repair shops will support mail-in refurbishing? Will people take advantage of that? Or just buy new for convenience?
2. Competition. Smaller motherboard vendors won't be able to sell direct anymore. I'm wondering if anyone can comment on how bad of a thing this is.
I've never upgraded a chip, but I've built plenty of computers, and mixing and matching was important for me.
I worry if we'll have less options down the road.
One of the things which has made PC so awesome since the early 90's has been the vast array of hardware available - you can just plug something out, plug something else in and boom, it runs faster, better and it's easy. You don't have to wait 12 months for a "new version of The PC". It's an open platform, we all love open platforms, don't we?
Cost and size. The bread-and-butter market for ARM is consumer electronic devices, where size really matters. Other chip packaging that's easier for hobbyists to work with would be a huge waste of space by comparison.
There are some ARM chips available in DIP packages, but I suspect that selection will always be relatively limited, since demand will always be relatively limited.
http://www.inquisitr.com/76157/tablets-to-overtake-desktop-s...
I can't see why Intel would continue to worry about an increasingly shrinking part of the industry.
"Unfortunately Intel doesn’t care about the enthusiast, and unsurprisingly they have moved on. ARM chips are now the focus for that crowd, and they are taking the mainstream geeks with them. "
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/26/intel-kills-off-the-deskt...
and it linked to:
http://pocketnow.com/android/droid-overclocking-reaches-30gh...
Taking that article at face value, I speculated that it would indeed drive people off.
The benefits are neglible, as next-gen RAM, next-gen peripheral bus, etc, all require a next-gen motherboard.
More of a concern is custom-built shopping, where it is harder for a small vendor to stock a batch of mobos and a variety of chips, and some chips go obsolete before sale (and so their mobos would be lost too...)
But hardware is really, really good these days (as the article notes). Runs cooler, less stress, less failure, far overpowered for most use-cases, less need to upgrade.
Enjoy our modern bounty and pay a bit extra for a new mobo every few years.
Alternatively, if there's serious demand for it I'm sure the market will come up with a solution. Motherboards with BGA-compatible sockets, perhaps. Or PGA sockets designed to accept adapters you can solder a BGA CPU into.
MB choice today seems to be rather simple for me: What _socket_ do I care for, plus what kind of slots and ports do I need (memory, pci-e, random ideas about the minimum required numbers of USB ports, whatever).
But for me the socket came always first. I upgraded my CPU quite often and would like to keep that option in the future. In the past there was no need to throw away your board for a faster (clock speed) CPU and it made sense to me that way.
Not really. You can use it to throw out motherboards that aren't compatible with the category to which your processor belongs. Which is probably a very loose category - "Motherboards which support socket AM3 CPUs", for example. That's just not a very fine filter - probably only vaguely more specific than "Motherboards which were released in the past 48 months."
In the cheap processor is married to the low-end motherboard and the expensive processor is married to the high end motherboard world you couldn't. To get the higher end features you would have to buy the expensive processor, even if you didn't need it.
I still have a few questions though. What will this mean for aftermarket heatsinks/coolers? I never run with the stock Intel/AMD heatsinks, will these coolers be permanently bolted on just like the processor?
And for motherboards featuring high-end processors, what will this mean for scenarios where the MB fails but the processor is still good. Will we just have to scrap the two altogether?
I think the issue here is that builders/gamers will be pushed into spending more. Right now you can get a < $100 ASRock board, pair it with a i5 3570K and a decent video card and you're off. Now you're more likely to have to grab a > $180 board if you want a top-end CPU.
Another circumstance I had was that I had a motherboard fail. So I replaced the motherboard but kept all the other components including the CPU.
The new CPUs tend to change sockets before prices drop that low. With memory bandwidth being the major bottleneck, a new CPU in the same system never seemed to give more than 10% improvement anyway.
First, after a few years, a new motherboard will probably require a new type of RAM, which can be quite expensive to fully populate.
It's also possible that the new motherboard will not have the same type of peripheral slots as the old motherboard did, requiring you to buy all new peripherals when you upgrade.
Finally, buying a new motherboard will force you to "upgrade" to a new BIOS, like UEFI -- which can bring in a whole host of problems that the old BIOS did not have (such as not easily being able to boot your existing operating system).
Since memory controllers are now embedded in the CPU, not on the motherboard, ram support depends on the CPU, not the motherboard.
> It's also possible that the new motherboard will not have the same type of peripheral slots as the old motherboard did, requiring you to buy all new peripherals when you upgrade.
Peripherals are going PCI-e-only, which is designed for infinite future compatibility. It won't be replaced in a decade, if ever.