LGA out after Intel Broadwell??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://translate.google.de/translate...%3Drss&act=url

The article mentions Intel will be focusing more on SOC designs,will abandon tick-tock and LGA CPUs. AFAIK,the site is relatively well known in Japan.

How much of it is true,remains to be seen??

[watercooled]

Must admit the translation is unpleasant to read so I only skimmed over it. It doesn't seem to quote any sources so I'd take it with a pinch of salt, but at least it balances out some of the AMD scaremongering we've seen lately...

[watercooled]

Just read the whole thing, or at least attempted to, and TBH didn't gain much more from it. Even if they drop LGA, we might just have PGA on desktop because of lower TDP or whatever, it was common to do that anyway before Core2 days, and at least they tend to pay more attention to platform power efficiency.

[BobF64]

Given Intels "Retail Upgrade Service" that they launched a few years back, where you can buy a code from Intel to unlock additional features of lower end CPUs, it wouldnt surprise me if they went down a BGA route, all boards come with a default low stock CPU and you pay Intel to get more out of it.

[watercooled]

I didn't think that turned out to be very successful? Still, the option is probably still there in current CPUs.

To do it for all CPUs, every die used would have to be pristine/top-binned, which I doubt would be profitable if they're selling most of them at the price of low-end CPUs, especially if yields are poor.

[scaryjim]

To do it for all CPUs, every die used would have to be pristine/top-binned ...

Not really - you'd just be binning down to a spec rather than up - so chips that would normally be a low end Core i5 will end up being i3 chips, and chips that would be low-end i3 chips end up being a pentium chip.

It'd be great for consumers - they could buy an entry chip, try out the performance, and if it was sufficient they wouldn't have to worry about spending any more. But that'd be terrible for Intel, because 99% of people would suddenly find out that the entry-point i3 was perfectly adequate for their needs and Intel would never sell another processor costing more than £100...

[watercooled]

But Intel have more than one die ATM; dual and quad core versions, each with one of two IGPs. But like you say, it's unlikely most people would bother 'upgrading' the CPU. Maybe they were just trialling it a while back to see how many people would buy into it?

[MrJim]

Here's an English language article which details the story:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html

[watercooled]

Motherboards OEMs really won't like that, as the article says. I can somewhat understand it for low-end CPUs but it seems a bit weird to be soldering on high-TDP parts which will presumably still have a heatspreader and need a large heatsink.

I wonder if we'll see some MFRs soldering CPUs to a third-party LGA/PGA converter?

Edit: User "BestJinjo" in the comments posts the following:

EDIT: This article is mistranslated.

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

That's kind of the impression I got when reading the barely-readable Google translation; it mentions this applies to specifically Broadwell, not Broadwell onwards IIRC. Have to be careful with rumours and foreign articles, a lot tends to get lost in translation.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

As usual the take by CD on this is amusing,although according to them Skylake might be socketed for a generation or two,although it might not continue.

The last time something like this happened with Intel was when the Intel Core was released,and the desktop platform was still based on the Pentium 4.

[watercooled]

In a story that SemiAccurate has been following for several months since we read the artcile five minutes ago...

If not, why only claim to know about it now? It's not like they care about the validity of information is it?

Just another of their sensationalistic, pessimistic articles of late...

As an aside, there are again plenty of flaws with the article, such as ignoring the massive desktop PC market used in business; tablets etc are still miles away from being a match for a PC for many purposes, e.g. typing and decent screen size.

[DanceswithUnix]

Makes total sense to me.

Intel have dominance of the desktop market with no sign of losing it for years even if they completely stopped developing. Why would they spend money making the product go faster? Not like they care about what we want or think, they will get our money anyway.

OTOH AMD have a chance with mobile parts, so I fully expect that to be where the Intel effort goes, trying to stomp out the competition. Now that Atom is being pushed downwards into mobile phones rather than upwards into laptops they really need something that can do the full netbook/laptop spectrum.

If Intel cared about the enthusiast, well the best CPU architecture they own is the DEC Alpha. I'll have an 8 core one of those in my LGA socket please

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Actually,this could all be down to what Anandtech reported earlier. Intel have over half their 22NM fabs going idle now,and if anything that means the expensive investment in 22NM is probably taking longer to pay off. The TDP reduction is going to be less important for desktops anyway,so by keeping the desktop CPUs on 22NM,that means they can use the 22NM fabs longer. On top of this this means,they will probably transition slower to 14NM and use this mostly for mobile devices,and this might end up more cost effective for them.

It seems a lot of the tech media missed this:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...or-ireland.htm

14NM is being delayed by six months at the Ireland fab.

Also,I was surprised that Intel actually had 7 billion dollars in debt,although they have $10 billion in hand.

[watercooled]

@DanceswithUnix: They risk completely losing the enthusiast market to AMD if they do it though; AMD will surely see the opening and go for it. They only really need socketed CPUs, competitive if not top performance at stock, and allow overclocking. Sure, the market isn't as large as other sectors but it's by no means small.

@CAT: It could, of course, be just another example of a word-of-mouth rumour getting slightly changed at every step and blown out of all proportion by the media. AMD seem to be getting fed up with it. We'll have to wait and see if Intel have anything to say on the matter.

[krazy_olie]

I'm not buying this fully to be honest.
While it's quite likely they'll be selling these soldered cpus I think it's for the laptop and all-in-one market.I can't imagine the sockets will go away for towers soon, although the release cycle may slow down.

[dotdrew]

They've just come out and said that they'll be committed to the LGA socket for the foreseeable future, in response to all the rumours, although they don't specify whether it's which socket they're talking about i.e. 2011, 1150 etc.

Source: Maximum PC, Intel Says Company Committed To Sockets. (Sorry, can't post links until I have 5 posts.)