While I can understand your frustration, you have to remember that Intel is in the business to make money, and making processors compatible with older chipsets is not important in that regard. Most people do not upgrade processors alone - this represents an extremely small percentage. Also, most of the people that do this, would buy the Athlon 64 because it is largely a better processor. Put another way, if they know enough to install new processors on their motherboard, they probably know not to buy a Pentium 4 in the first place. But again, this is a very low percentage to begin with, and if there is some advantage to making it available only on one chipset, you have to expect Intel to do it.

Do you remember the Tualatin? That was even more disagreeable. If you do not, they created this magnificent processor that was incompatible with all the previous motherboards and required new chipsets to support it. Since the Tualatin represented the last version of the Pentium III and was a very attractive upgrade otherwise, and the previous chipsets offered all the same features, it was a terrible situation to put people in. As opposed to the 975X, which is a different chipset, Intel just released the 815 B-stepping which was in no way superior except for the fact it supported the Tualatin. On top of this, they created two somewhat incompatible Tualatins - The Pentium III/Celeron, and the Pentium III-S. They got power differently, so if you put a Pentium III-S in a non-server motherboard, you shortened the life of it (a point virtually all the reviewing sites, including this one, completely missed). The reverse was true too.

The advantages of this change were minimal (they lowered the bus voltage from 1.5v to 1.25v), but even if they felt it necessary they could have easily created a Tualatin for the AGTL+ sockets that came before it. They did not, and instead created a confusing market and limited upgrading for Coppermine owners to faster Coppermines. Tualatins were much faster (particularly the Pentium III-S) and ran cool.

So, Intel is not really a vendor you want to buy to if you want to upgrade the processor later. AMD, to their credit, does a nice job of offering reasonably good upgrade paths and has much better reasons when they can't.

Oh, one thing I will mention is a company called PowerLeap. This company has adapters that allow use of processors in motherboards they would otherwise be incompatible with. Sadly, they are quite expensive and normally not worth it (some costing over $200 just for the adapter, but most much less), but they work quite well. For example, I was able to get a twin Pentium III-S 1.4 GHz running on an Intel OR840 motherboard, using RDRAM. This is as good as it gets for the Tualatin, this chipset and motherboard are excellent for multiprocessing and RDRAM is much more useful for the Pentium III in multiprocessing configurations, vis-a-vis SDRAM or DDR (which implies a non-Intel chipset for the Pentium III), than it is in uniprocessing ones. So, while the adapters were expensive in this case, they allowed me to get greater performance than I could otherwise get without them (HE-SL and Apollo Pro 266T are inferior). So, you might want to keep them in mind in the future, they have some interesting products (and some are inexpensive - around $40).

I can understand you points, and certainly Intel like any other company is after the bottom line. However, at the end of the day, they are out to sell processors. If they their processors were more compatible with chipsets of the previous generation, that used the same exact socket, they could potentially sell a significant number of additional processors.

This does not only apply to enthusiast who want to upgrade just the processor, but to OEM mainboard manufactures as well. Everytime Intel requires a new chipset to support a cpu, the mainboard manufactures have to modify their designs, thus putting off a ready base for the processor by many months.

One sign of this was when Intel complained of the slower than expected adoption rate of their dual core processors. They priced theri dual cores low, to spur adoption and sales, but sales were slow, because they immediatly eliminated all those 925, and 925x owners outthere, and also all those OEMs, who already had assembly lines pouring out new PC's, that they could have simply swapped in a dual core processor if it had been compatible. Instead OEMs, had to redesign their boards, and pcs to take the new processor.

This is even more relevant now that Intel is pulling back from teh chipset bussiness from the low end. Simply put, the more chipsets Intels processors are compatible with, the more they will sell.

Its not like there was a dractic differance between 915, 925, 925x, 945, 955, or even 975. All of those chipsets use the same socket, and 925x, 955, and 975 even support the 1066 fsb. Most changes were done to the southbridge. I think it entirely feaseble that Intel could have made the dual cores compatible with 915, 925, 925x.

Now with this latest round of processors, Intel is goign to want 975, whose only differance from 955, is that it supports ATI's Crossfire, and maybe eventually Nvidias SLI. It just seems to me that Intel keeps raising the bar unecessarialy, and loses sales to both OEM's, and enthusiast.

I disagree the number of additional processors Intel would sell would be significantly higher. If you are buying a machine, you will buy the chipset that supports the processor. The only additional processors you would see would be upgrade processors, and this is miniscule compared to what they sell via other means.

Now, if everything were equal, yes, of course supporting more chipsets would be better, but there is a cost in that. I do not know the reasons for it, but obviously Intel had to have some and they figured it weighed more heavily than the benefits. Neither one of us has information even remotely useful compared to what Intel knows. They made the decision that it made more sense to only sell to one platform, and I have to believe they knew what was best for them. Maybe they will offer more for other platforms later and were not ready to qualify them yet? Maybe there were technical reasons for not wanting to do it. Who knows?

With regards to OEMs, keep in mind the 975x was already out there. So, they know how to make these things. Also, Intel makes a lot of these motherboards for OEMs, and even those that do not use Intel motherboards often get them from another maker. So, the disruption is relatively minor from their perspective. They might have to switch how many of each board are made, but they were already making them. Or ordering them. But, with regards to these constant new chipsets from Intel, I am inclined to agree with you. When they keep introducing new chipsets, it does have a price, and they seem to do it very often. Also, why did they use RDRAM on the Pentium III almost exclusively, and have abandoned it for the Pentium 4? Pentium III did not benefit much from it, if at all, whereas the Pentium 4 loves RDRAM. Strange.

Without knowing why they changed decided not to use it with the older chipsets, I think it is dangerous to say whether they could have made the dual cores compatible with them. I am not saying you are wrong, because I don't know their reasons. But, even if they could, it obviously meant very little in terms of cash. As much as the AMD fanboys like to think it, Intel is not full of idiots. So, if it was easy to do, there was no money in it. If there was money in it, it must have been difficult or impossible. There was a reason they chose not to.

With regards to the 975 and 955, if that is truly the only difference (I don't believe Intel tells us everything) then maybe they have not done sufficient testing right now and will qualify that as a product that can handle it at a later time.

With regards to enthusiasts, they don't mean much to Intel. They represent a very insignificant proportion of their sales, and right now I don't know that they have a product enthusiasts want. It seems to me the Athlon 64 would be a more appealing solution for most of the enthusiast crowd at the moment. This is not to say Intel has forever ceded this, but right now AMD arguably has the better product. Even if they didn't, Intel's history of limited upgrade paths is not attractive.

I want to bring up one other point. The whole upgrade market has changed a lot since Intel first started making "overdrive" processors. Now, most people buy crappy motherboards from Asia that are very cheap. Back when motherboards costed $1000 or sometimes more, and were made to last, upgrading a motherboard was cost prohibitive. Now, upgrading a processor and not the motherboard is not a good idea nearly as often as it was back then, because they are so cheap and they don't last very long anyway. While you can still buy good motherboards from Supermicro, most people do not and end up buying inferior quality motherboards from companies like Asus (and oddly consider them quality :P) for less than 1/3 of the price. They are so much cheaper, they are difficult to resist, and even I find myself buying this rubbish sometimes (but only from Epox, which have been strangely reliable for me, although I sense I have just been lucky so far ). So, nowadays, I think it is very common to swap the motherboard with the processor, with the added benefit of having a backup when the motherboard breaks, or even for making another computer.

Let me ask you, do you ever just upgrade the processor anymore? I ask because it would never even occur to me these days.

Actaully, I have for several of my past pcs. I had a 1ghz Athlon, with a 266 fsb, and I was able to swap it out for an Athlon XP 2000+, while keeping the same mother board and ram. That motherboard is an Asus, and has so far lasted 5 years, and is still up an running fine :)

About 6 months ago, I got an Athlon 64 rig, and intend in the future to swap out the processor for a nice dual core processor, while still being able to keep the ram and mobo. This time though the modo is DFI :)

So yeah, with some planning, I think one can get a significant boost in performance, from just upgrading the processor, espcially if they buy a budget processor, and decide later on to upgrade it.

I blew out two Asus's, two Aopens, and have a flakey as Hell Soyo on my hands that I am about to throw out the window. All this in the past four years. On the other hand, my stupid Epox's never die. I bought two of these (plus an old Super 7 I bought many years ago) and they have not had a flaw yet. The Intel motherboards never seem to die either, and neither do my Supermicros. I know I should get shot for this, but I really like the Epox motherboards. I fight it, but they are so easy to work with, and have been flawless.

I still use some Asus motherboards, but they are dual Katmais or actually this machine, my internet surfer which is only a 500 MHz uniprocessor Katmai on an Asus P3B motherboard. I don't like noise in this room, because it is where I sleep and listen to music, so this fanless setup works great. So far, it is typical Asus junk, but it works. It is tempermental with memory, sometimes doesn't properly respond to a reset and has to be reset again, etc... You know, the typical irritating but not too serious problems. Still, Intel's are so much more elegant. None of this nonsense at all.

My computers tend to be up virtually all the time, so it may explain why they break more often than yours do. Not too long ago one of my favorites died, an Asus CUBX. That was a really nice motherboard, but sadly, it is no more (sniff, sniff). The 440BX was one great chipset, and that motherboard was probably the best implementation of it.

My luck has been very good with Asus boards. In fact I still have an old Super Socket 7 Asus board, with an Amd K62 runnign on it at 450 mhz. With 128 megs of ram, I was actually brave enough to load Win XP on it, and it actually works fine for word processing and internet browsing.

Ive built 6 pcs with Asus boards, and they are all still up and running fine. I find that this kind of thing happens alot, with all sorts of pc hardware. Some people just have better luck with certain brands for some reason that I have never figured out.