John Hearns wrote: > > > http://www.zdnet.com/intel-preparing-to-put-an-end-to-user-replaceable-cpus-7000008024/ > > Class, discuss.
Currently one can buy a motherboard and then select one of many processors that fit it, based on price/performance tradeoffs. So if there are 4 mobos and 5 processors the end user has 20 choices, which is good for the end users - they can buy pretty much exactly what they want. Do we really expect that the mobo manufacturers are going to want to make, stock, sell, and ship 5 variants of every motherboard they make? Or if the move extends to soldering in memory (a truly horrible idea, given how many bad memory sticks show up) they would also have to set up even more variants with different amounts of memory. The end result will be a massive reduction in the choices available to the end user, which inevitably correlates with increased costs. It would end up like car buying, where options come in "packages", so if you want the power windows you also have to buy the power sunroof - even if you don't want the sunroof. Intel must like this idea though, because it converts the PC (even more) into a throwaway object, like a cell phone. CPUs do fail sometimes, and the hapless consumer would get to replace the entire motherboard/cpu/memory instead of just the one component. The ball grid array might save the manufacturer $1 over a socket, but the lack of flexibility in product offerings is going to cost the end users much more than that. For large sites it also eliminates the possibility of combining two broken machines to make one working machine. Well, unless they have the tools for swapping BGA chips on a motherboard, which I think isn't going to be very many sites. Regards, David Mathog [email protected] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
