News Intel proposes easily repairable and sustainable modular PC design for laptops and mini PCs

[Admin]

Intel proposes using multiple boards in laptops and mini-PCs to enhance upgradability and repairability.

Intel proposes easily repairable and sustainable modular PC design for laptops and mini PCs : Read more

 

[Jabberwocky79]

I love this idea. It would actually make me stop hating laptops and mini pcs for the first time in my life. LOL

 

[Jame5]

This rings super hollow from the company that just made the switch to all-in-one SoC style packaging instead of allowing user-upgradable RAM using LP-CAMM2 or similar technologies.

 

[Amdlova]

They can start stoping with two generation socket mother boards.

lga17xxx to 18xx same garbage
Lga 1151 from z170 to z370 have same specs

Nvidia time right now!

 

[thesyndrome]

This reads like Intel suddenly discovered Daughterboards and it blew their minds

 

[EzzyB]

This rings super hollow from the company that just made the switch to all-in-one SoC style packaging instead of allowing user-upgradable RAM using LP-CAMM2 or similar technologies.

I believe it was reported here that Intel has already said that was a one-off design and future laptop CPUs would not have integrated memory.

 

[Notton]

Yeah, separating I/O on daughterboards is a very old thing because of how frequently they would break a port.
Reusing mobos between several sizes is also not a new thing, but it's usually done as a cost saving measure on low-end laptops.
Acer does it on their Aspire 3, and Dell does it on their Inspiron line, but both don't use it consistently.

 

[User of Computers]

Intel has reinvented the Nuc.

 

[lmcnabney]

This is the same company that changes the socket every couple years, right?

 

[eye4bear]

Exactly what I was thinking, they could do more to solve e-waste if they didn't force us to buy a new MB with a different socket every 2-3 years...
Plus, there has been a modular laptop on the market for the last several years and Intel just noticed?

 

[scottscholzpdx]

Back in 2007 I had a girlfriend whose roommate/landlord worked at Intel solely for standardizing things such as this. Didn't happen until possibly now? Strange.

 

[thestryker]

Intel has come up with several iterations of this over the years and it's never really caught on. OEMs love every last dime they can get and these types of solutions are slightly more money to manufacture. Their in house extreme NUC line had removable card versions for 9th/11th/13th Gen if I'm remembering right. They also had varied compute elements used and a NUC Laptop.

Again the problem comes down to the major OEMs as these cost more to make and potentially could "steal" sales down the road. It seems like a really silly stance to take as I imagine they'd all make more money if people could both piecemeal upgrade and easily repair devices.

 

[Eximo]

After seeing the teardown of the RTX 5090, not much holding back the ability to have all kinds of components easily replaceable. You damage the DP or HDMI port, just a few screws and a cable. An expensive example, but shows that it can be done.

Even the framework laptop has soldered ports, those are modular to the outside, but you can still damage the board. Of course replaceable boards.

Seems to me that people upgrade less and less often since computer requirements aren't changing as much. Might be the time to corner the market on longer life platforms and it makes people feel warm and fuzzy about not creating e-waste. They will pay extra.

 

[Phyzzi]

They can start stoping with two generation socket mother boards.

lga17xxx to 18xx same garbage
Lga 1151 from z170 to z370 have same specs

Nvidia time right now!

It used to be even worse, but it's certainly frustrating to realize that a Mobo that does all the same stuff, sometimes on a chip with essentially the same architecture, won't be useable when the CPU gets an upgrade, AND that you have to go through and rematch all your system components to that "socket", sometimes including ridiculous things like CPU fans. As I said, this has all gotten better, but tue first time I ran into a hiccup with that while system building, I almost could not believe it .

 

[Li Ken-un]

Hard to tell from the blurry picture what the illustration of hot-swappable NVMe SSDs is supposed to show. From what I can make of the latch, they mean like E1.S? About time something from the enterprise side trickles down to consumers for once. This better be well-designed to prevent physically connecting the SSD backwards though. I nearly set my apartment on fire on one sleepless night connecting an EDSFF cable to an E1.S SSD.

And the PCIe add-in cards might as well be E3.S. That’s also what they were designed for―not just NVMe storage.

 

[beyondlogic]

dear intel maybe check the nearest landfill and figuire out ditching a board after a couple of generations is the biggest e waste.

also get your partners to stop using thread lock so people that actually try to upgrade there equipment can actually do it.

and when companys actually add a pci slot x 16 slot and a better psu in all in one pcs ill start to believe this tackling of e waste.

 

[thestryker]

Hard to tell from the blurry picture what the illustration of hot-swappable NVMe SSDs is supposed to show. From what I can make of the latch, they mean like E1.S? About time something from the enterprise side trickles down to consumers for once. This better be well-designed to prevent physically connecting the SSD backwards though. I nearly set my apartment on fire on one sleepless night connecting an EDSFF cable to an E1.S SSD.

And the PCIe add-in cards might as well be E3.S. That’s also what they were designed for―not just NVMe storage.

It looks like it's a caddy for M.2 though I'd be perfectly happy if E1.S came to desktop/NUC and left M.2 for laptops/handhelds. It should be impossible to put these in backwards as they're plugging into a backplane.

 

[derekullo]

Intel wanting us to buy less PCs is like Google wanting us to see less ads.
Something smells fishy!

 

[nrdwka]

This rings super hollow from the company that just made the switch to all-in-one SoC style packaging instead of allowing user-upgradable RAM using LP-CAMM2 or similar technologies.

and, sadly, they all do that for this gen: intel, amd, quallcom

 

[Penzi]

As someone who rarely upgrades CPUs but often upgrades GPUs, I applaud.

Personally, the laptop element is of zero interest (detest the form factor) but I’m due for a CPU upgrade in the next 1-2 years (5800X at the moment) and I’ve settled into the middling GPUs (I have a 4070 at the moment) because I only game on my WinPC and I’m not spending $X thousands every two years for that hobby. Would love to build (or have a prebuilt) small modular box like this (from AMD if we’re talking today: 9800X3D is definitely on my shortlist of one) perhaps with a Celestial GPU…

 

[passivecool]

"Past development is not an indicator for future performance."

 

[Li Ken-un]

It should be impossible to put these in backwards as they're plugging into a backplane.

In a normal setting, yes. But within the build-it-yourself crowd (which these modular bits are for), some people cannot resist the temptation to unscrew exposed screws. To discourage them from exposing the backplane or bare PCB with the EDSFF connector, the means to remove such physical protections should be well hidden or at least behind a tamper-proof warning label.

The 1C connector itself should have been keyed, rather than relying on the surrounding physical elements to prevent incorrect insertion. But this is the design we have, and we need child-proof protections for the kids in some of us.