While I agree that the upgrade market is confusing these days, I'm not sure it even matters much to Intel.
Very few people upgrade their processors, and most of the time it is a mistake anyway. It always has been. By the time one piece becomes obsolete, the rest of the machine probably is too. Surely that's not an absolute, but in general it applies to most people. The ones is doesn't apply to, don't really matter much in terms of sales. They are a tiny, tiny fraction.
Upgrading CPUs is relatively new anyway. The 8086/88,286 and 386 generations were not supporting "overdrive" processors from Intel. The 486s did, and even the Pentium had overdrive processors. The Pentium Pro was the swansong for this though, with the Pentium II overdrive being the last of such processors. Since then, Intel simply doesn't care, and if it works out that you can upgrade easily, that's almost accidental. The Tualatin incompatibility bites me a lot, since I can't stand the current garbage AMD and Intel sell and won't buy them, and getting new Tualatin motherboards is not very easy anymore, especially dual processor boards. So, it's frustrating for me, but when you consider the percentage of people that are impacted by this, compared to the benefit of the changes they made (for example, lower voltages on the FSB) it probably is a worthwhile tradeoff.
In this instance, it sounds a lot the same to me. Intel is creating compatibility problems, but it seems only with the VRM instead of both it and the chipset, to create lower power solutions for their newest processors. The tiny number of people that don't like this, compared to the number that will benefit from the heat and power savings, simply don't matter enough to make this a bad idea. Progress is more important than minor compatibility, particularly if you can simply buy a new motherboard and get what you need. It's not like motherboards are expensive anyway. They are cheap junk compared to the past when motherboards costed $1000 and lasted close to forever. So, upgrading processors without motherboards is not a priority for Intel, and while I've suffered from this, I can understand it completely.
[Posted by: TA152H | Date: 02/02/06 08:00:22 PM]
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