Rumour: Intel to stop manufacturing LGA CPUs, killing off enthusiast PCs
By Tim Colwill on November 27, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Tech site Semiaccurate is running a story which claims that Intel is set to cease manufacturing LGA CPUs in just over a year, with their upcoming Broadwell range rumoured to be not coming in a stand-alone, removable format. Future Intel CPUs are expected to be soldered directly into motherboards, and not sold as separate components for people who, like us, enjoy assembling our own PCs.
The news was broken by Japanese site PC watch (here’s a rough English translation), and Semiaccurate claims that hardware manufacturers such as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and others were not told about the news until it broke through a third party. Semiaccurate claims that two OEMs “have now been briefed that Broadwell is BGA only”.
What does this mean? If you want a Broadwell CPU, you’ll more than likely have to buy it soldered into an Intel motherboard. If you don’t want an Intel motherboard, tough luck. The move is being seen as an attempt by Intel to use their market share to push further into sectors traditionally contested by other hardware manufacturers, and it’s one that — depending on how you feel about Intel boards — may or may not cause tears of rage. What do you think?
Source: Semiaccurate
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From the words of Francis….
“You sons of bitches…”
I call shenanigans on this one…
Does Intel really have the capacity and supply chains to take out all the other motherboard manufacturers and only sell the chips on their own boards?
This would almost certainly spell doom for an entire industry, i just don’t see it happening.
Oh well, back to AMD I guess.
Question: could this move be seen by the US FTC as an anti-competitive monopoly?
They pursued MS for less.
If it were true, I see AMD capitalising on this. Oh well, hopefully it is only rumour.
I remember this company called 3dfx that once tried to take over all their own manufacturing and it was an immense disaster.
Welcome back, AMD.
This information is only semi-accurate.
Seriously though, a sad day for PC enthusiasts should this come to fruition.
I don’t see any other enthusiast CPU manufacturer, do you?
If they pull this stunt, it means all the OEMS (Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI) will just have to branch out.
Also if they do this, AMD better make a damn swift comeback.
I’m not a terribly big fan of AMD chips, but if this turns out true then I Know I’ll be more than willing to forget Intel and start singing AMD praise.
I don’t see this coming in. This is most likely to simply be an error in translation (as with most stories that are sourced from non-English sites).
Soldered down? As in they’re not inbuilt into the motherboard but just attached in a way that you can’t take them off? I’m calling bs until I hear otherwise. Just sounds stupid if not utterly anti-competitive.
Surely they don’t want to handball AMD that much instant business?
I call bollocks.
They’d have to do a massive 180 on their current downscaling initiatives and even then there’s a reason AMD is no longer favored.
I’ll still get another upgrade from my Core i7 3930K to Ivy Bridge-E with any luck.
PC’s from vendors such as dell, HP etc’ are about 360 million units a year, for someone like Intel to turn their back on that is ludicrous.
That’s also not accounting for Home Built systems either, which company’s like Corsair have thrived on.
I reckon that the targeted low/mid-range models say like the socket 1155 platforms will probably end up with the CPU soldered onto the motherboard.
Enthusiast/High-end platforms like Socket 2011 will probably still get upgradeable processors due to the nature of who it’s targeted at. (Professionals and Enthusiasts.)
A large problem with the PC arena is that, even a 5+ year old system based on a heavily overclocked Core 2 Quad Q6600 and a decent graphics card can STILL handle pretty much *everything* you throw at it, there really isn’t much incentive to upgrade as often unless the machine dies an unexpected death.
What needs to be done is for the software to catch up to the hardware!
It is a miss translation
This is what some on xbitlabs translated it as
“This article says:
– Intel will not provide new products for Desktop and non-BGA laptop segments in Broadwell era
– Instead, they will provide higher clocked Haswell for those segments in 2014
– Broadwell is “more than tick”, and it will include some technologies that were previously planned for Skylake
– This is because Intel needs to be more competitive in the tablet market, and this may mean the end of Tick-Tock strategy
– It mentions nothing about Skylake and later or if they will be LGA or not for the desktop”
I’m also calling BS on this one. It won’t just affect gamers. It would mean that businesses and corporations also would lose an upgrade path for their server hardware. It just doesn’t make sense. Intel has very lucrative arrangements with companies like Gigabyte, ASUS etc. They don’t just provide the CPUs for those motherboards – they provide many of the components that go into those boards too. They provide the chips and components, and they leave it to these OEMs to do the international marketing, design etc.
I’m not up on the latest work coming out of Intel right now, but if this rumor is true and Broadwell is BGA only, I’d say they’re working on something else for LGA that hasn’t yet been announced.
Also – if you’re putting the boot into your biggest competitor, why would you all of a sudden turn around and remove yourself from one of the biggest segments of that market and effectively throw them a lifeline? It doesn’t make any sense.
I cant see this coming to fruition myself but I could be wrong.It would be monoplising the hardware market and would be considered anti competitive by accc and others world wide.If they did do it, well its off to amd for my next build.
…and just like that semiaccurate.com gets a massive spike in traffic.
Not going to happen, there would be anti-trust inquiries within 10 minutes of such an announcement.
And next, on GON today tonight…..
What is the go with the increasing trend of alarmist factless articles on GON in the last year or so? Creating storms without even the teacup. It is getting beyond rediculous now.
Thank god Intel aren’t the only CPU manufacturers.
Seconded, they pull a stunt like that and they’d go out of business. I don’t see them trying to get a bigger slice of the pie in that way, everyone would just stop buying their products if the option to upgrade your processor easily goes out the window.
Seriously, what is it with these sensationalist articles? Last time I checked, GON is run by Internode, not News Corp >_>
Semiaccurate needed a visitor spike and we are all idiots for participating, even the doubters.
hey, dont tell me what to do buddy.
Combine that with this — http://www.techspot.com/news/50874-amd-the-rise-fall-and-future-of-an-industry-giant.html — amazing TechSpot article and we may have AMD’s new future.
This all still needs to be validated though…
This makes sense to me, the majority of Intel’s processor sales would come from laptops and pre-made desktop computers (Dell, HP etc) so the sales lost to enthusiasts would be more than made up for the increased revenue of motherboards.
AMD will of course leverage this and market their processors (and in turn their video cards) to the enthusiast market.
All that said, it’s a rumour.
It’s a rumour, its clearly marketed as one and we didn’t write the original article.
It’s an interesting situation, so we posted it, and you guys clearly read it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this news post.
(*post made from the viewpoint ignoring the announcement and just looking at the market*)
I think a lot of you guys are kidding yourselves if you think the enthusiast market means anything to Intel. The only reason enthusiast products exist is purely for bragging rights, not because Intel really care if you can eek out a few extra Mhz on a LN rig.
OEM producers like Dell would buy boards with built in CPU’s if the cost difference was minimal. The vast majority of desktop users in the world will never use a fraction of the CPU power available to them and won’t care if the CPU is integrated. And if their integrated chip goes, or the mobo, and it’s still under warranty, the whole thing get’s replaced anyway. Same with rackmount servers, how many admin’s in orgs really give a crap how the CPU is fitted if it is warrantied and works? I know I sure as hell don’t and we run over 100 physical servers and a full virtual environment…
AMD are declining steadily atm purely because they can’t get a big foothold in the OEM/workstation market, not because of enthusiast performance products. We had no end of troubles with our dabble in to AMD/nforce based computers and it was a pita compared to the Intel products we had been using.
And lastly, dev’s have been lazy. Few games really use all that firepower in the monster multi-core/multi gigahertz CPU’s these days anyway unless you’re pushing some obscene resolution (surround/eyefinity etc style systems). Why on earth would Intel keep shipping monster enthusiast processors when a console processor (as opposed to graphics cards) is the benchmark for most titles these days?
***************
Now, all that being said I really hope this is just a rumour and doesn’t pan out. As a person who builds their own system, I like the freedom of picking my own product, or being able to selectively upgrade along the way if I want. But I’m under no illusions that Intel really doesn’t care about the enthusiast segment and is looking to hammer home it’s advantage against AMD. If they can unify the hardware and put more of their own mobos/CPU’s in OEM boxes, and if they can get away with it in terms of anticompetition (I don’t see how they can though), they will.