News - Intel to exit desktop motherboard business following Haswell

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Chipzilla will focus on new reference designs for EFF, all-in-ones, ultrabooks and tablets.

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Read more.

Initially read it as no more intel CPU's for desktops and had a small crisis.

it's all going smaller!

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Originally Posted by Obscurity

Initially read it as no more intel CPU's for desktops and had a small crisis.

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Same here... 'Whaaaaaat?! Oh, wait...'

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Originally Posted by Obscurity

Initially read it as no more intel CPU's for desktops and had a small crisis.

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Ditto - although all the Intel gear here is in laptops, desktops are all AMD-powered.

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the partners do a pretty good job of making competitive, feature rich and differentiated boards based on Intel’s reference designs

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Agreed, last time I was motherboard shopping I remember thinking that the Intel boards looked expensive and less feature-rich than the ones from Asus and Gigabyte.

That's a shame, I've got Intel motherboards in 3 boxes where stability mattered most and in 2 of those machines for the CIR header that only Intel seem to put on boards.

Intel boards have always been feature-less and expensive. Not sure why even they bothered making motherboards. ASUS , MSI , GIGABYTE have been ruling the motherboard section for quite soemtime now

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Intel will continue to supply chipsets to companies like ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI to cater for the desktop market.

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Phew! Panic over.

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Originally Posted by OilSheikh

feature-less

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Which made them good in low power scenarios, my ITX server is 18W.

All those pointless extra I/O chips and fancy crap adds power draw but little utility.

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Originally Posted by OilSheikh

Intel boards have always been feature-less and expensive. Not sure why even they bothered making motherboards. ASUS , MSI , GIGABYTE have been ruling the motherboard section for quite soemtime now

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Well, IMHO, for the reason Kingpotnoodle mentioned .... "when stability mattered".

Asus, MSI and Gigabyte are all decent brands, but over the years, I've had failures in all three, and some, surprisingly early. On the other hand, and while noting that my experience may differ from others, I've yet to have an Intel board croak.

Two examples of machines I still have, working perfectly. First, an old Pentium 2Ghz RAMBUS machine, acquired when it was state of the art. It did me daily use for years, and is still used from time to time. Second, a machine that started as a dual Celeron 550 server. That ran the checkouts at a supermarket for years, running 24/7/365, and I bought it EOL when they scrapped it. In fact, I got three. I upgraded it to dual 900 Celerons, and it's been my backup server for, well, about 8 years.

Fancy designs with all sorts of bells, whistles, doodads and whizzbangs are all very well (and I've got my share of them, too) but many corporate buyers are VERY conservative when it comex to mission-critical stuff.

That server, for instance ..... in it's supermarket days, no server => no checkouts, and that meant store closed. And yes, I've come across many supermarkets with dual servers, or more recently, smarter checkouts with an offline mode, local pricelists, etc, and a batch update mode for later after the server comes bsck. But not in that store, at that time, with those servers. So, if the server goes down, you close the store lose both turnover and profit and, arguably worse, force customers to go elsewhere, which supermarkets never like because those customers might not come back, having tried the other place.

IIRC,the Intel motherboards were made by Foxconn for them. However,as mentioned before their mini-ITX motherboards were actually quite decent and low power too.