Intel's Haswell May Be Last Interchangeable Desktop CPU?

[Deadboy90]

Complete BS, but if it is true then we need find who's grinding up lead based paint into the Intel execs cereal every morning.

 

[Guest]

If this is true than.....

The Bad;

1. This will suck beyond belief.
2. This will seriously hurt motherboard - component manufacturers as most of the devices are integrated on the chip.
3. This will raise Intel/motherboard prices through the roof.
4. BGA's are notorious for lifting themselves off of the PCB's. Especially considering this is the CPU were talking about. Give it a years worth of heat/cool cycles and the board will be useless. With leaded solder this would not be an issue, but with ROHS.... This will create an RMA nightmare!

The Good;

1. Maybe this chip will only make it into disposable electronics like cell phones and tablets.
2. For AMD this will be an instant win. Even I would switch to AMD if Intel tried to move this CPU into the desktop market. This could be AMD's golden opportunity to climb out of the black hole they are currently sinking into.
3. Maybe Intel will mount the BGA chips onto and interposer PCB that will have pins/grid array on the other side, allowing for socketed CPUs, as has been done in the past.

 

[CaedenV]

For those who listen to the Anandtech podcasts this is not exactly a 'new' rumor. ~2 months ago they talked a bit about how Intel is having issues with the LGA platform on a technical level with the smaller chips that are coming to market, and so it needs to go. Their theory was that we would see BGA (or something like it) on everything from tablets to pre-fab desktops. The do-it-yourself market may still have an option for swapping out CPUs, but it would have to be something other than LGA.

Just remember that this is Intel we are talking about. This is the company a year ago that practically said that in the future we will purchase products based on our screen and form factor needs, and things like the CPU/GPU will not be a consideration because what is paired with the screen will be 'good enough' for what that form factor is expected to do. The CPU becomes transparent rather than the focus of the system. This idea becomes really interesting with the introduction of retina displays. When we know a 'maximum resolution' for a device, then it is possible to know a 'maximum processing power' that such a device will require for things like games. Or perhaps we dont even go that far? Maybe we get a 'max CPU power' for things like web browsing and document work, and games get streamed from the game provider?

Anywho; The idea is that everything becomes a terminal which is capable of handling 90% of user's needs. If you are doing something bigger than your terminal handle on its own (like mass storage, heavy gaming, design work, etc) then you would purchase a server to take those loads off of the local machine which would do all of the heavy lifting for you.

Conceptually I actually like this idea, but it is going to be a rough transition for those of us who like our big beefy glory rigs. But then again perhaps it won't be such a transition? I have already found that my rig is taking more and more of a home server role providing content for my wife's PC ad our phones, and I would almost like it better if it were tucked away in some other part of the house, and all I had in front of me was a silent user interface. So long as I get my 60fps in games, and a good experience with my NLE then I am good with it. But I think we need to see faster Ethernet standards to come down the pipe to make it a reality.

This is the ultimate push towards the cloud. Your phone, your 'desktop', and your tablet/laptop all become portals to your documents, programs, and information. They will be able to work together as a mesh of devices, all aware of eachother, perhaps to the point of being able to be used as a pool of screen realestate as a single UI across devices. But whatever the case, these devices will be cheap, easily replaceable, and have access to your stuff no matter where you are. Meanwhile all of your digital stuff stays safe locked in a closet, encrypted, and with drive redundancy. Thats where we are going. I hope that the big companies like MS and Intel don't screw it up through the transition.

 

[loomis86]

[citation][nom]billgatez[/nom]This is obvious BS. Intel would never do this. The revolt from the PC makers would be crazy.[/citation]

Right. And MS would never do something as dumb as deleting the start button and forcing a touch screen UI on non-touch screen customers.

 

[spookyman]

And yet for the past 30 years Intel has made a socketed CPU. It will prolly be a smaller swappable CPU though.

 

[Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer]

This has got to be about the dumbest idea in technology I have heard in a long time (and there have been some doozies lately). How does this help anyone? What is the point of making such a boneheaded move? Two decades now we've been able to slot our CPU of choice into our motherboard of choice and now Intel want to solder them down? Un-flippin'-believable...

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]bucknutty[/nom]The biggest problem I see with this is what happens to the motherboard manufacturers. For example right now I want an i5. I have like 250 boards to choose from starting at $50 and going all the way up to 350. Are all those now going to come with a cpu attached? How many different board and cpu options will there be on the market? It just seems from a inventory and manufacturing view it would be much more difficult to have as many options. Right now there are like 10 i3s and 10 i5s and 5 i7s that will all fit in the same 1155 board. So to have as many options in a basic $50 mobo the manufacturer would need to have 25 skus instead of only 1.Think about an e-tailer like newegg. Right now they have 250 1155 boards and 25 1155 cpus. Thats 275 inventory items for them to stock and it allows the customer a million options. If they had to carry every board with each of the 25 cpus they would need to stock 6,250 different boards (with CPUs) to give the customer the same amount of options.Thats just not realistic. If Intel does move to the ball packaging I have a feeling many manufactures will stop making mother boards, and many e-tailers will offer much fewer options.[/citation]
But they wouldn't need to. You are not going to pair an i7 with a $45 motherboard. Nor are you going to put an i3 on a monster rig with SLi and a million HDDs. In the end it becomes more like the cell phone market: cheap systems are slow with limited connectivity, while expensive systems will be fast with lots of connectivity and features, and there will be a few grades between each extreme.

The larger concern than putting the CPU directly on the mobo are the other considerations going on with CPUs. Intel is not just talking about moving to a chip that is tied to a board; Intel is talking about moving to a full on SOC style integration. We are talking about the CPU, iGPU, north bridge, south brigde, and possibly even some system memory all being put on the chip. This means that the CPU you purchase determines the feature set of the system you are buying instead of the other way around. It also means that mobo manufacturers are going to have a much harder time differentiating themselves from their competition.

This is nothing new, and has been happening for a while (especially when things like nVidia and VIA chipsets disappeared a few years back). Mobo companies focus less on a boards feature set (because they are all similar), and focus more on things like solid caps, modified drivers and electronics (like ASRock 555), color schemes, better coolers, more usable layouts, etc.

I also think we will see less CPU skus as well. Perhaps a small handful of entry level CPUs with various power vs GPU configurations, and then a simple locked/unlocked choice between higher end CPUs. It becomes a choice of features/price rather than clock/price.

 

[twelve25]

All this says is that Broadwell (i.e. the continuation of mainstream desktop processor) will go BGA. It didn't say there won't be any more socketed CPUs. Lately there have been XEON processors in the high end desktop range. I can't see the server market going integrated. It may just be that hardcore enthusiasts get pushed into XEON (or some new "gamer" variation of XEON) and the lower end stuff ends up all integrated.

 

[DRosencraft]

The thing is, I have heard this rumor before, citing the same relative time-period. Don't know if that makes the rumor more or less likely true. Honestly there isn't a lot of sense in doing this as a strategy for their entire CPU lineup. We have interchangeable CPUs now precisely because we wanted to be able to upgrade and what not as we like. But it shouldn't be wholly surprising. Intel has been notorious for not having clean upgrade paths, changing the socket type all the time.

Even so, I suspect that if there is any truth at all to this rumor, this SoC plan will be for lower end of the lineup, something like the i3s or lower end i5s. They might get away with doing this and not losing too much ground to AMD. Or they could work out something with the motherboard makers to just have them make their same boards they do now but just solder in a CPU before shipping it out the door. But I don't think that is particularly feasible, and not likely to make people either switch to or stick with Intel.

 

[Guest]

This is excellent news for AMD

 

[cmi86]

And Intel moves in for the choke hold... Without AMD providing at least somewhat competitive viable options on the high end intel is going to destroy the enthusiast market my jacking up prices and doing away with customization and freedom of choice. Intel makes nice chips but their business practices are a-typical.

 

[kinggraves]

No, it could be possible. The key word is that last speculation, hear me out. They can still offer high end discrete CPUs for the gamer/enthusiast market, and offer integrated platforms for the lower end market. They already do this to some extent with Atom so I don't see why it would shock anyone here. This is basically just stretching Atom into higher price brackets.

Do I agree with it? No, not at all. It could be a strategy to fight AMD's attempts to put everything on the CPU die. Rather than place the components on the CPU, they integrate it straight to the mobo and make it one large integrated platform.

This is where the PC industry thinks people want to go. They think everyone wants to own a tablet, that everyone wants their data in the cloud, and that they should focus on shrinking things down rather than increasing speeds. Maybe they've hit a plateau as to what they can effectively do with PCs in terms of power when it comes to current gen manufacturing techniques. They can't build faster anymore, only smaller.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]g00fysmiley[/nom]i tend to buy one chip and stick with it, till upgrading the machine, but it is nice to have the option... also very enthusiast and gamer unfriendly, if amd doesn't go this way and they can keep price to performance competative i agree with spentshells amd will get my buisness[/citation]

think bigger picture...

with intel you can get a cheaper cpu and use sli
if they solder it to the mb, you have to use a higher end intel to even sli, hell probably a high end intel just for an x16 slot.

 

[ilumunus]

wow i bought ivy bridge i7 3770k and ima build in january, now this coming out im mad

 

[jaber2]

If you recall we did have a cpu on a board before, this will just another one of those plug-in cpu boards that can be replaced, I think I still hove one of those in my garage. They are trying to make it like smart phones, the next upgrade would require new smart phone and not the chip alone.

 

[deksman]

People... we are already at a point where we could have beyond contemporary supercomputer power in a fully integrated manner (if we used superior synthetic materials, and created technology to reflect our latest scientific knowledge with highest efficiency).

Point is, integration of this scale is inevitable.
Eventually you will see full computing solutions at a microscopic scale in the market (even though we can already do this) - at which point, individual hardware devices will be pointless.

I wouldn't be necessarily against this if the market wasn't throwing revisions of existing tech once every 12 to 24 months and gave us the best of what is technologically possible... but since it is not doing it, consumer grade market will suffer to a degree (at least temporarily) until you adjust to the change and then you will have to shell out more cash for the ability to upgrade.

 

[spartanmk2]

I cant see any mobo makers attaching a cpu to a board and making it all-in-one, imagine the loss in revenue when they get returns because of a malfunctioning part(s) that wasnt cpu related and cost 1/50th the cost of the cpu that was soldered on. :-s

 

[sonofliberty08]

so in 2014 those consumer who buy Intel PC will get a MAC instead ? guess that's why they cannot swap the parts inside......

 

[internetlad]

This is completely backwards. If anything, it should be the high end chips that are embedded, so optimized performance can be tweaked by the manufacturers, and the mid-range with it's 101 flavours of chips should remain separately LGA packaged.

I'm thinking Mr. Parrish might have grabbed a couple of morning caps before he typed this up, or Intel has a lot to answer for when it's stock takes a dive.

 

[internetlad]

[citation][nom]ilumunus[/nom]wow i bought ivy bridge i7 3770k and ima build in january, now this coming out im mad[/citation]
so mad you forgot everything you knew about spelling and grammar.

 

[rds1220]

You can say what you want but this is bad for everyone. If Intel is doing the soldering than that will kill the motherboard manufacturers. Also If something breaks, let's say just the motherboard you have to replace the board AND the CPU. So instead of spending 200+ dollars on a new board you have to spend 500 because you have to pay for the board and the CPU. Lastly it is bad for the OEM's. If their crappy motherboard dies they have to either unsolder, re-place, and re-solder each and every CPU or trash the board. I doubt they will want to do that considering it will cost them alot of money. They will have to also stock motherboards with each and every CPU model, this is expensive and risky. The same for online stores like New Egg and Tiger Direct. The point is this whole idea is stupid and bad; it's bad for the end user it bad for the OEM's and it's bad for the industry as a whole.

I want total control over my build. If this is true I'm upgrading at Haswell then when that becomes obsolete I'll be switching to AMD.

 

[silverblue]

On the Intel front, it's possible for the general consumer to pull out the CPU and replace it with a meatier upgrade.

Only on the Intel front? I admit this isn't about AMD, but posting this after...

As of late Intel and AMD have provided two separate desktop platforms, addressing the mainstream desktop and the high-end powerhouses.

...is a bit strange.

 

[pjmelect]

I think that this is a bad idea the same as most of the readers of this forum. Unfortunately we are in the minority. The majority of desktop computers sold are cheap and nasty ones like from HP, e-machines, Dell etc. These computers are sold on price and a integrated CPU could make the computer cheaper.
I have my doubts about the reliability of the soldering on a BGA CPU chip, particularly lead free soldering. The CPU gets very hot and has a large weight on it because of the heatsink. I don't think that the long term reliability will be very good.

 

[Guest]

Unfortuneately for the enthusiast like all of us every single top end silicon design company is moving toward the goal of ultra small and ultra powerfull. Look at the most sucessful part of the market, tablets. Very small, fast for what they do, reliable, and not bleedingly expensive. Even in commercial markets OEMs want cheap but good systems for thats all customers want, cheap, unobtrusive, and efficent. The high end market is not what makes any company money, we are a nich market with a high profit margin but relativly low sales compared to OEM and average computing products. The future comes with a lack of freedom but with this lack of freedom innovation can flurish. Just imagine an entire $4000 system on a single die that you can take wherever you want. Unfortuneatly our market will end and we will just have to put up with what we get.

 

[hannibal]

Well to normal Walmart customers (the big majority) this is not big issue. They buy computer and use it untill it brokes down. For the professionals and heavy users this is really bad. Intel propably will maintain highend with lga, but it allso means higher costs because there are less users who will buy LGA based version on CPU's. So Intel in segmenting the CPU sales ones more. They will get more money from this change ones more...
The fruits of monopoly!