Tuesday, January 22nd 2013
Intel Exits Desktop Board Business
Intel decided to quit the PC motherboard business by shutting down its Desktop Board brand. To company will begin shrinking its motherboard product line with the arrival of socket LGA1150 Core "Haswell" processors, and eventually leave the market within 3 years. One can draw three distinct inferences from this move. First, Intel's Desktop Board lineup is too bloated, and the desktop form-factor is on a rapid decline in relation to the rest of the PC industry. Second, with the emergence of new high-volume brands in the motherboard industry, Intel is finding its lineup out of place.
Third, and more interestingly, this could be a move by Intel to pacify other motherboard vendors about the impending transition of a bulk of the motherboard volume from changeable CPU socket to hardwired BGA, which is bound to happen in a couple of years from now. Other vendors expressed apprehensions over the transition to BGA believing such a more could make Desktop Board put them out of business. Intel's Desktop Board team will instead spend resources in developing new form-factors such as the NUC.
Source:
PC World
Third, and more interestingly, this could be a move by Intel to pacify other motherboard vendors about the impending transition of a bulk of the motherboard volume from changeable CPU socket to hardwired BGA, which is bound to happen in a couple of years from now. Other vendors expressed apprehensions over the transition to BGA believing such a more could make Desktop Board put them out of business. Intel's Desktop Board team will instead spend resources in developing new form-factors such as the NUC.
23 Comments on Intel Exits Desktop Board Business
IMO they are boring ass boards.
BGA will not be good for Intel mobo makers and likely Intel customers. It may turn out to be like BTX in many ways, a loser. AMD has no plans to go to BGA in the foreseeable future so many enthusiasts will go with them and a quality mobo for far less than Intel's bundled mess.
For those who don't know Intel has made some quality "basic" mobos but they have also had a number of models of both mobos, chipsets and CPUs that were defective. At one time they were the mobo industry quality/design leader but that was decades ago and it's been all downhill from the early 90's onward.
But this signals the end of midrange and lightweight PC's running X86 chips overall I am afraid to say. With SOC and ARM making the move, thin clients a real possibility and almost a mandate with the watered down "pad" generation of hardware I see two markets, enthusiast/HPC and tampax.
A little OT but so you may know, I though I was the only one having weird BIOS issues but it seems common to other Asus Z77 users particularly the P8Z77 series...
It was a GREAT and NICE mother board, CLEAN and PURE with full power for overclocking and rock solid reliability.
It's a shame.
I loved Intel for their unique platform boards but never really for the conventional kind. Things are changing in their target and they are finally killing off the major problems they have had with their poor mainboards by eliminating them.
p.s. if TPU is looking for a proofreader, contact me ;)
'' Currently, AOpen is a subsidiary of Wistron Group, a spin-off of the Acer Group '' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOpen .
believing such a "more" could make; should be "move"
I am just surprised that this didn't happen sooner.