News - Could Haswell be Intel’s last range of swappable CPUs?

[watercooled]

I agree, it makes little sense, and without understanding someone's requirements, how do you justify calling them 'plain stupid'?

On the contrary, constantly upgrading CPUs for little to no benefit to one's own requirements is likely a waste of money, but not stupid. A while back, upgrading a CPU might have yielded a reasonable improvement in performance, but with the frequent socket changes of late, unless you picked a fairly low-end CPU to start with, you're not likely to see much of a jump on the same socket.

[Major_Trouble]

Whenever I upgrade my CPU I am usually upgrading my motherboard at the same time for the extra features i.e. USB 3.0, Sata III so having the CPU on the board is no big deal. But what if your MB or CPU goes bad. Bit poor for overclockers. Just more expense to fix it. Not happy with that. What next, MB already has the RAM attached so you buy a 4, 8, 12, 16GB version at the time like tablets and phones.

[Willzzz]

Surely if your MB or CPU goes bad then you just send it back? There should be no cost to you if it is not your fault.

[dangel]

Surely if your MB or CPU goes bad then you just send it back? There should be no cost to you if it is not your fault.

outside warranty? due to damage? etc etc

RMA's are a PITA all round too.

What next - i want to upgrade my RAM but it's soldered to the board too?

[Willzzz]

Warranties are pretty good, and chances are that if something is going to fail it will fail early on.

Afters 3 years you are probably looking to upgrade anyway as a few generations will have gone by.

[dangel]

Warranties are pretty good, and chances are that if something is going to fail it will fail early on.

Not really (please provide stats to the contrary)! And having argued endlessly with some companies about the validity of claims it's somewhat naive to think it's hassle free.

There's so many reasons why this is stupid for consumers it should be pretty obvious as to why it really only suits intel and not you.

[edzieba]

The return of the CPU + RAM daughterboard?

[watercooled]

Fully agreed, there is no benefit whatsoever for consumers. Just because it's only a minor negative for some people, on the surface, doesn't imply it's positive. For the same basic reasons as soldering CPU, having motherboard MFRs attach RAM directly would be catastrophic for them, but Intel have little control over that - even now we see some desktop motherboards using SODIMM because the motherboard designer chose it.

[Golden Dragoon]

I think I have done a cpu upgrade on the same board 3 possibly 4 times, one of them was replacing a 386 with a cyrix 486, another was when I bought a Duron 800 while waiting for the cash to get a faster athlon xp, and the last one I can remember is upgrading a c2d e5200 to a q6600.
On the other hand, I have upgraded motherboards many times with more than half of them keeping the same cpu, to get newer features such as pci-e or usb2.0, or just to get better overclocking performance.

[Jay]

I have upgraded my current PC's CPU from a e6600 to a Q6600 (that was a while back) and I also upgraded my old P4 back in the day from a 2.8 with 400Mhz FSB to the 800Mhz FSB HT version and my old Duron to an XP so I tend to get a few CPUs per board.

[jimborae]

..........
What next - i want to upgrade my RAM but it's soldered to the board too?

Hmmmm Apple anyone....

[johnami]

Upgrading the CPU on your motherboard was always just a sales argument. It sounded good to one's mind but how often future CPUs featured new sockets meaning a new main board had to be bought!
The memory and graphic card were / are the main upgrades if you are quick enough :-)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have upgraded my current PC's CPU from a e6600 to a Q6600 (that was a while back) and I also upgraded my old P4 back in the day from a 2.8 with 400Mhz FSB to the 800Mhz FSB HT version and my old Duron to an XP so I tend to get a few CPUs per board.

I have upgraded my last few rigs too as I tend to keep them for a while.

[Kumagoro]

I think it is dependant on what level of chip you have.if you are the sort who buys a reasonably high level one in the first place your not likely to upgrade to something a smidge better. If you start off with a dual core then I think you are much more likely to upgrade in the future.

[badass]

I bought an AMD S754 based system years ago with IIRC the 3000+ Athlon64 CPU with the intention of upgrading it when a substantially faster CPU became available in the same socket. In the end, unsurprisingly I never upgraded the CPU - just the whole lot. Thanks AMD for such a short socket life, BTW. :-|
I replaced it with a Q6600+P35 chipset based system. With the support for the upcoming 45nm CPU's, I would be able to wait for a few years and then when the 45nm CPU's got cheap as newer faster ones became available, I would upgrade just the CPU. 45nm Quads that were tangibly faster than the Q6600 never appeared for anything less than rip off prices. Thanks Intel for "I know you're locked in pricing :|
That got replaced with my 3570k based system. I know that the CPU's never getting replaced on it. I've given up on that now. What I do know is that I won't need a faster CPU for the next 5 years. Probably more. I should also be OK with 32GB RAM.
It'll sadden me if they do go down the soldered on the mainboard route but at the same time, it will have no effect on me, nor probably 99% of PC users. In fact, it'll probably have no effect on more than 80% of enthusiasts.

[baius]

I would like to see maybe up to Core i3 BGA. you get it with Atom already and could give HTPC or home server builds more powerfull SOC solutions.
Intel is releasing its own SOC the NUC.

I haven't read the article; just the Hexus comments. Intel (and AMD) make a fair amount of money out of enthusiasts. I think k4p84 may be right, although none of us (except maybe Intel) can know for sure.

My HTPC CPU is an on-board AMD E Series. My desktop is a 'repaceable' Intel i5. That's the way I'd like things to continue to be next time I upgrade either system.