Modular Motherboard? An April Fools' Joke With Actual Promise

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Nice idea in theory but highly unluckily to make it into the real world.

The idea is not new, Gateway or one of the other large OEMs did exactly that in the mid-90s: put the VRM, CPU, north bridge and RAM on one card, put all the IO controllers and PCI/ISA slots on the other part. You want to upgrade the CPU, you replace the CPU card.

The same thing could still be done today but with CPUs tied to only one or two generations of chipsets on Intel's side, you'd still need to replace the IO side of things on nearly every CPU upgrade anyway.

 

[cmza33]

It's a nice joke to think about. If we had 3D printers that could cut, print, pick-and-place, this would no longer be a joke. (Ive been trying to think of a way to print semiconductors. Not fast ones. 1980-calculator speed ones, at least to start. Use an FPGA to do the firmware interconnect (and possibly anywhere else wire swizzling was needed). Printable supercomputers (that keep your entire neighbourhood warm at night...)

 

[bit_user]

If we had 3D printers that could cut, print, pick-and-place, this would no longer be a joke.

Keep dreaming. I'm sure layout of these boards still takes some skill and effort. Manufacturing and assembly can't be trivial, either. Just look at how many complaints people still have about boards designed and manufactured by teams of experts with streamlined processes and vast amounts of experience. Yet, you suggest this could all be automated and made inexpensive enough for neophytes?

And not everything on your board can be done with FPGAs. Plus, replacing many of those ASICs with FPGAs would run hotter, burn more power, and add more cost.

I suggest people should stick to 3D printing case parts and perhaps low-speed, fairly simple circuits.