Well, there's always AMD, and there's always Opteron...I'm wondering whether it'll be more fun to build a 16 or 32 dual socket Interlagos on a G34 with quad channel ram, though 2x8 PCI-e 2.0 seems to be a more limiting bottleneck atm. There aren't any games that I know of needing that much ram (64GB+ non ECC) yet, but when PCI-e 3.0 comes out for AMD chipsets, I wouldn't mind using an Opteron board that supports it- the Quad channel and the many-core would have an advantage, but how much under HyperTransport 3.1? It would be future proofed for several years, limited only (well, among a few things now) by the lack of multi-threaded apps above 4 and 8 cores.

sell there is always BGA to Socket adapter...

Wait 'til the first AMD CPUs that have been tweaked/designed by Jim Keller are released. Then we'll really see the return of AMD to the performance CPU market.

I can easily see Intel getting rid of sockets for the mainstream products, and it's a good idea. It saves the vast majority of people buying them some money, although not a huge amount. Plus, it adds greater differentiation between their high-end and high mid-stream product.

For example, many people will buy the i7-3770K instead of the i7-3970x or other LGA-2011 processors. This isn't really what Intel wants, and making one upgradeable and the other not is a way to add some extra value to their enthusiast chips.

Right now, would you rather have an i7-3770K, or a i7-3820? Most would prefer the i7-3770K. If you couldn't remove the i7-3770K for an upgrade though, which would you choose? At least a few would go with the 3820 and the socket platform. So, it's smart for Intel.

Of course, AMD will no doubt keep using sockets, so for the $200 and less market you'll still have good choices. LGA 2011, or whatever replaces it, isn't so bad if you've got $300 or more, so it's not really that bad of thing for the consumer, although the $200 to $300 market is going to be impacted.

Even so, everyone else who just wants a computer and isn't going to upgrade it will get a small cost benefit, and that's worth it to Intel and the companies that sell the machines. I can't say I blame them.

Intel might even face anti-trust issues if they try to eliminate the independent mobo makers entirely.

Intel wants to concentrate their profits further by monopolising the motherboard market, after they kill off the Taiwanese. This way they can squeeze more money out of the likes of top tier OEMs like Apple. It's almost predictable in tough and protracted economic conditions. By the way, the Taiwanese are also getting assaulted from the other end by Microsoft, who themselves are trying to concentrate their profits by designing and producing their own hardware.

This is bad not because of lack of upgrade possibility.
Now, a motherboard manufacturer has to support the price of the chipset. The final price it is including all the costs, like waste, like the estimated percent of units not sold. In the end, the buyer is paying all. If a manufacturer is not selling enough, he has to raise the price of what he is actually selling.

Now, under the umbrella "great integration" Intel wants to force the OEMs to support the cost of the entire SOC. This has a big potential to go wrong for the consumer, price wise.

This system makes sense in mobile market for 2 reasons. It's a requirement for improving power consumption and second the SOC it's cheap ! The price is somewhere between 5 and 20$. The mobile market is moving big volumes now. If something is not sold, isn't the end of the world. But this is not the case any longer in the desktop market. If something is left unsold, a big cost will go down with it. That for Intel is good. They are selling more chips anyway and the end costumer will have to support the cost of the entire operation.

But Intel is stupid and so is Microsoft. The ecosystem around x86 made this platform world wide accepted. Involving other companies was successful in the long run. Now that the market is slowing down they try to shut out the other participants and claim the entire pie for them self. That is greedy and stupid and will not pan out as intended in the end. The ones they shut out will have to find or develop alternatives. An entire ecosystem which worked for them will work against them.

This 2 companies had a lot of opportunities to keep the x86 riding in front of the new trends but they preferred to sell less and expensive instead of more and cheap. Now they try desperately to keep up their revenues and by doing so they impose more costs on whats already slowly becoming an unattractive ecosystem.

People are making a lot of assumptions here. I don't think self built systems are going anywhere anytime soon. Even the guy from Asus doesn't seem to think so. Even if they do start going to all or mostly BGA CPU's it doesn't necessarily mean the end.

I think the mobo makers would simply start mounting the BGA chips onto some sort of a board. The other side of the board would have pins on it to plug into the motherboard. If it would make manufacturing any easier they could even make the board a little bit bigger so they could maybe spread the pins out a little bit wider than the diameter of the processor. There should be enough room on the motherboard since so many former motherboard components are now being integrated into the processor.


They could charge maybe an extra 20 dollars for their trouble, and they would probably even make money off of it. But if this happens I hope the different mobo makers come up with a universal standard, instead of them all using proprietary mounting systems. Heck if they're smart the top 4 or 5 motherboard company's could even chip in on development of a universal BGA socket adapter. Then they could maybe even license the tech and somebody else could start a business buying Intel BGA processors and mounting them onto these cards. So it could potentially start a totally new type of VAR business.

I don't mind having to pay a little bit more for this work around, as long as it's well under 50 dollars. Us DIY enthusiasts don't make up such a large market as we used to, but I still think we're big enough to be worth messing with. We are the type of people who will upgrade our systems even though we already have a very powerful computer. Just because we like to have the maximum power with the latest and greatest hardware. Just look at all of the enthusiast websites and enthusiast component websites. They wouldn't be there if there wasn't much of a market. I also think if Sony and Microsoft use X86 in their next gen consoles it will help advance PC gaming by giving us better ports.