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The end of the road for the DIY PC?



 
 
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  #1  
Old November 24th 12, 11:46 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
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Posts: 1,296
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.

I've been upgrading my original system since 1987, and right now there's
no original pieces remaining on it, but I can trace each of the pieces
back in a chain to the original 8088 PC-XT clone that I had bought back
then. I suppose it was meant to happen, not many people build their own
PC's anymore, and it's been cheaper to buy a full brand-new system for
many years now rather than upgrading it.

Although this is just an Intel announcement, and AMD hasn't said it
would do the same thing, but I don't see AMD not following suit with
this, it'll help their financial situation too, and probably help them
even more.

I suppose you could keep upgrading if you buy a full new motherboard
alongside your CPU, you'd probably have to buy it with new memory also.

Yousuf Khan

Intel’s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html
  #2  
Old November 25th 12, 12:16 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.

I've been upgrading my original system since 1987, and right now there's
no original pieces remaining on it, but I can trace each of the pieces
back in a chain to the original 8088 PC-XT clone that I had bought back
then. I suppose it was meant to happen, not many people build their own
PC's anymore, and it's been cheaper to buy a full brand-new system for
many years now rather than upgrading it.

Although this is just an Intel announcement, and AMD hasn't said it
would do the same thing, but I don't see AMD not following suit with
this, it'll help their financial situation too, and probably help them
even more.

I suppose you could keep upgrading if you buy a full new motherboard
alongside your CPU, you'd probably have to buy it with new memory also.

Yousuf Khan

Intel’s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html


There's always a solution.

Remember that Foxconn makes their own sockets for motherboards, and
they also make motherboards. The motherboard industry could cook up
a flexible solution all on their own.

There are a ton of cheesy adapters out there. Lots of opportunities
for someone to cook up a solution. All that's needed is sufficient
lead time to do the engineering and make a reliable solution.

http://www.primedistributing.com/Pro...PA-BGA-SMT.jpg

And if Intel makes tested silicon die available as a purchase option,
someone can package them at an MCM factory. And put any kind of lead
or contact on it, that you want.

This is just an opportunity for someone - a middle man - to make some cash.

Paul
  #3  
Old November 25th 12, 05:09 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Geoff
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Posts: 692
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

Apple was/is like that, limited options in changing out hardware. If Intel
completely removes the DIY aspect of a PC then they are handing business
over to Apple. Also, a lot of third party vendors will probably close shop.

Fixed hardware + a Bing OS (aka Windows 8) = a fast declining pc industry.


  #4  
Old November 25th 12, 05:14 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel
Intel Guy
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Posts: 84
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's
after Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA
packaging,


My first PC (besides a couple pocket computers) was a real IBM PC circa
1983. I upgraded that as much as I could over the 3 years (but never
had a hard drive) and my next PC in 1987 was a 24 mhz Harris-80286-based
motherboard made (IIRC) by Western Digital - with integrated MFM (or was
it RLL?) winchester controller. I never did own any 386-based boards -
I moved directly to various 486 boards, and skipped the Pentium-1 and
instead owned various P2 and P3 boards (slocket, 370, etc). Was never
into AMD.

Since I use Windows 98se (fortified with KernelEx) for my primary
systems - based on 2.x ghz socket-478 Pentium and Celeron CPU's. I have
several Asrock/Via-based socket 775 boards waiting to be used as my
next-gen systems (still plan on running win-98 on them). I build the
PC's at $dayjob and our developers have Gigabyte socket-775 boards with
4-core CPU's, nvidia 7k or 8k video cards with dual display, and don't
really need anything more. They run Windoze 7 (some still run XP) and
we probably will never migrate those to Windoze 8 or beyond (those guys
will retire before windoze 7 becomes obsolete). Heck, our NNTP and HTTP
servers still run on NT4 servers running on P2-800 Gigabyte Intel 440BX
motherboards - 24/7/365 for more than 10 years now.

For the general-purpose SOHO desktop, the socket 478 was a real work
horse for years, and the socket-775 didn't really seem to hang around
for long - but I seriously doubt that the average person (soho, or
institutional / corporate) needs more CPU (not counting portable use, or
gamers).

So basically I've been out of touch with motherboards since maybe
Q3-2007, but I seriously doubt I'm missing anything for the past 5 years
except that the boards are getting more colorful and have sick-looking
heat sinks.
  #5  
Old November 25th 12, 05:18 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Geoff
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 692
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

The motherboard industry could cook up a flexible solution
all on their own.


.... but MB manufacturers usually work from reference hardware put out by
Intel/AMD/etc. Would they be willing to produce items not covered in the
reference?

What does BGA really mean, one buys the MB/CPU as one item? Or does the
whole DIY concept die and the Newegg 'Computer Hardware' section disappear?


  #6  
Old November 25th 12, 05:33 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Loren Pechtel[_2_]
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Posts: 427
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 17:46:12 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.

I've been upgrading my original system since 1987, and right now there's
no original pieces remaining on it, but I can trace each of the pieces
back in a chain to the original 8088 PC-XT clone that I had bought back
then. I suppose it was meant to happen, not many people build their own
PC's anymore, and it's been cheaper to buy a full brand-new system for
many years now rather than upgrading it.

Although this is just an Intel announcement, and AMD hasn't said it
would do the same thing, but I don't see AMD not following suit with
this, it'll help their financial situation too, and probably help them
even more.

I suppose you could keep upgrading if you buy a full new motherboard
alongside your CPU, you'd probably have to buy it with new memory also.

Yousuf Khan

Intel’s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html


What good does it do them to make it so you can't install a CPU? I
would think that would cut CPU sales!
  #7  
Old November 25th 12, 05:53 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13,364
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

Loren Pechtel wrote:
On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 17:46:12 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.

I've been upgrading my original system since 1987, and right now there's
no original pieces remaining on it, but I can trace each of the pieces
back in a chain to the original 8088 PC-XT clone that I had bought back
then. I suppose it was meant to happen, not many people build their own
PC's anymore, and it's been cheaper to buy a full brand-new system for
many years now rather than upgrading it.

Although this is just an Intel announcement, and AMD hasn't said it
would do the same thing, but I don't see AMD not following suit with
this, it'll help their financial situation too, and probably help them
even more.

I suppose you could keep upgrading if you buy a full new motherboard
alongside your CPU, you'd probably have to buy it with new memory also.

Yousuf Khan

Intel’s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html


What good does it do them to make it so you can't install a CPU? I
would think that would cut CPU sales!


There are other packaging concepts. Such as putting the CPU
on a removable card. This might not be that easy to do for
a P4, but processors with QPI or DMI, it might work out.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/upgrad...939CPU%20Board

That makes the failure group a bit smaller. And if the
edge connector was standardized, it might allow swapping the
processor card between systems.

That does screw up cooling. In that existing heatpipe coolers
might not fit in the confined space available.

It's just a matter of where you move the interface point.
BGA to PGA adapter plus PGA socket. Processor card with
socket for FSB bus, whatever it happens to be.

Paul
  #8  
Old November 25th 12, 06:58 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 1,453
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjKEmKUatJ4
and a whole bunch more at
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...=bga+soldering

What, you mean you don't have a heat gun in your electronic toolbox
along with the soldering iron, or hot air station sitting on the shelf?
The spouse will get ****ed if you don't cleanup the pancake griddle
after using it to remove and resolder the BGA parts. You must have
soldering wick, though. Just means you'll have to put those old-school
soldering techniques in your backstore memory and learn how to desolder
and solder BGA parts.

You're just spoiled by sockets that made it possible for home users with
no or destructive soldering skills to add components to a mobo. Maybe
the parts vendors are getting tired of the returns by boobs that don't
employ anti-static measures, overclock, overheat, or otherwise destroy
good parts. Soldering on the CPU, chipset, memory, and other components
would certainly up the reliability of the assembly while reducing
returns from ignorant, lazy, or sloppy users.

Intel¢s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html


That wouldn't prevent first-time soldering of the CPU onto the BGA grid.
The mobo maker could just make a plastic frame to hold the chip in place
(both for position along with affixing to the mobo via spring clip) and
the user would use a soldering iron with a tip designed for the BGA grid
pattern. The user would buy the mobo they want, the CPU they want, and
then do a one-time solder of the CPU onto the mobo. After all, after
you buy the mobo and CPU and put them together, how often have you
actually replaced the CPU? Yeah, if the CPU goes bad then you have to
replace it but have you had to do so? When the CPU gets too old,
underpowered, or lacking in firmware features, do you really replace
just the CPU or do you replace the CPU, mobo, memory, and the whole
smash to upgrade to newer hardware?

Also, you can already buy mobo+CPU combos from online vendors. Most
times they pre-install the CPU so all you have to do is attached the
heatsink+fan (and sometimes you don't have to do that if you stay with
the stock HSF for the CPU). So instead of them sliding the CPU into the
ZIF socket for you, they'll have an inventory of pre-soldered
combinations and you pick one to buy.
  #9  
Old November 25th 12, 07:47 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
GMAN[_14_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 180
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

In article , "geoff" wrote:
Apple was/is like that, limited options in changing out hardware. If Intel
completely removes the DIY aspect of a PC then they are handing business
over to Apple. Also, a lot of third party vendors will probably close shop.

Fixed hardware + a Bing OS (aka Windows 8) = a fast declining pc industry.


Sounds like the 1990's Atari ST, AMIGA all over again.
  #10  
Old November 26th 12, 04:51 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Michael Black[_2_]
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Posts: 164
Default The end of the road for the DIY PC?

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, GMAN wrote:

In article , "geoff" wrote:
Apple was/is like that, limited options in changing out hardware. If Intel
completely removes the DIY aspect of a PC then they are handing business
over to Apple. Also, a lot of third party vendors will probably close shop.

Fixed hardware + a Bing OS (aka Windows 8) = a fast declining pc industry.


Sounds like the 1990's Atari ST, AMIGA all over again.

Really, every computer. Sure you could buy an S100 bus systemin the early
days, but there was limited ability to upgrade despite all the boards
plugging into a motherboard that only had sockets.

It was easy to move to the Z80 from the 8080. But the bus was very much
related to the 8080, so "foreign" CPUs took a lot of adapting. Even the
front panel on the Altair was too specific to the 8080 to be useful with
another CPU. The standardization was often because of CP/M the operating
system, since it was written to keep the I/O in a small section, one could
fairly eaily adapt it to other hardware (as long as it used the 8080).

So the real upgrade path was the 16bit CPU, preferably the 8088 or 8086.
But then there were other issues besides differring buss signals, such as
lack of address lines for more RAM. There were various schemes to deal
with that, but it took time before standardization set in, and then it was
mostly too late.

When MITS came out with a 6800 based computer in the fall of 1975, they
put a different bus on it, and when SWTP put out their computer (which was
far more successful 6800 system than the MITS 6800 system) it used a
different bus (though that bus tended to be used by other 6800 based
computers).

The DIgital Group that was more like a hobby trying to turn into a
commercial product, it used its own bus which made it easy to have
different CPU boards, but they never went further than the Z80 and maybe
the 6502.

The Apple II wsa fairly flexible, so one could get Z80 cards for it, then
later 6809 cards, and at some point 68000 cards. But they were
workarounds and usually the 6502 did the I/O.

Let's not forget that the original IBM PC was no different from that Amiga
or Atari. ALl three had CPUs in sockets, but there was no plug in
replacement that made things faster. You could workaround that, but it
would need a whole board. And you'd be stuck with the existing clock
frequency unless you had complicated timing methods (to run the CPU faster
but the bus at its regular rate).

It was only with time that the "IBM PC" became more flexible. And that
was more a crossover between the CPUs and the motherboard manufacturers.
So you could put in a faster CPU, but that's because the motherboard
company anticipated faster speeds and put in jumpers. That meant the CPU
companies had to keep the other companies informed of where they were
going.

In the 386 era there was some level of variability, so you could get a
cheaper one that had no math coprocessor built in (and oddly then find a
math coprocessor to add later).

It was really in much more recent times that a motherboard had some hope
to be useable over time, and that was because the CPUs generally stopped
changing that much, the speed being the key factor. If the motherboard
anticipated upgrades, and the CPU kept the same package and other
features, then you could use the motehrboard for a few years. Usually a
new motherboard was needed if the databus bumped up in size, the exception
being eventually with the 32-64 upgrade.

Otherwise, it would be no different from the Amiga or Atari, except by
that point nobody was making CPUs to plug into the expansion bus (I once
found an 80286 card that did that), so you had to replace the motehrboard.
But then, the motherboard probably cost as much as one of those plug in
upgrade boards in the past, but the new motherboard didn't have to
compromise. The only good thing was the case was generally generic so the
new motherboard fit (well so long as the area for connectors at the back
matched up or could be replaced).

Michael


 




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