Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
It's a massive deal because the flexibility of computers is a massive deal.
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Here's the thing: You very seldom see high end cpu's on low end boards, or low end cpus on high end boards (you see a lot of high end on medium, because premium or cutting edge chipsets are for people who throw money around and don't care anyway). You also don't really see many people, even gamers and enthusiasts who swap CPU or even upgrade it. It's not like you have any vendor portability or even socket's that last more than a year or two (Tho I guess 1155 has been around quite a while now). Yes it will hurt repairs and such, but you're almost certain to see a drop in price at the same time. That said, it's been a while since I've seen real hardware failure outside of dead HDD's or dodgy dimms.
There's always a few different chipsets, which give rise to many mobo manufacturers spamming out subtly different products - how much difference do they make to the consumer? More annoying than anything else. The chipset gives you the majority of the features people want, while some extra on-board packages add flavour. Given a year, these features are often a little the worse for wear and will often end up gimping your new CPU anyway.
Now, given that most of todays cpu's are essentially the same die with different features fused off and limits set, it's not exactly a huge problem to expand product ranges to fill up the demand of the mobo makers with cpus that match demand. The mobo guys will be the ones finding the sweet spot, rather than just spamming the market. Better thermal integration would also be interesting and beneficial. More conservative production runs, market matched costing and less capital locked up in potentially duff products should make the whole chain happier.
A good example of the market driven design is in the AMD E-350/450 stuff. No one cries that they cant put an AM3 cpu onto those boards, no one wants to put an E350 onto their mid range board. Yet they were great little dev boxes/htpc - at a *really* solid price.
At the end of the day : few people upgrade cpus, fewer downgrade and sockets are single vendor and often short lived (outside of the mainstream desktop).
As I said, if it were slots, memory or storage, I'd be up in arms too, as those are things that people do change and upgrade often. But it's not. It's also not the end of Intels socket history, and just maybe it'll have been proven quite reasonable.