Intel considering abolishing CPU sockets for consumer market?

[3dilettante]

If Intel, at some point in the future, truly ditches socketed processors for the consumer market and moves to BGA-only bulk shipments, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some proprietary interfacing standard to replace it.

What's wrong with PCIe, and who is going to trust the longevity of a motherboard manufacturer's proprietary interface?

but to no avail. Now with the advancement of the lithography and integration one could have a powerful CPU+IGP and multi-gigabyte of fast memory (high-density DDR4) soldered on a single small PCB. The main board would still handle most of the periphery and maybe direct integration of SSD storage in some form.

I just pointed out with interposer or on-package DRAM that there's not even the need for a tiny PCB.
Intel also intends to put the southbridge on-package, so the periphery is basically whatever wires are needed to go from CPU package to some I/O hanging off PCIe.
SSD interfaces are already bottlenecking higher-end drives, and it seems the future direction is SSD to PCIe or some variation thereof.

 

[Sxotty]

I am not happy with this, but lately I haven't swapped CPUs and kept motherboards much. Still I think it will significantly degrade my choices when building a system.

 

[nutball]

I always liked the promising idea of the original Slot 1 by Intel

Well, that's your choice of course. Personally I thought that Slot 1 / Slot A were truly ridiculous in a PC, an engineering solution to an engineering problem that should never have existed.

Slot-mounted CPUs and daughterboards and all the rest might make sense now, in server space (micro-blades, if you like) but in the PC they still don't make much sense at all. They only make sense now in the server because of the degree of on-die integration, which is the antihesis of the reason Slot 1/Slot A were invented.

 

[ninelven]

Expandable RAM may be the province of workstation and high-end servers only.....

The difficulty of having CPU dies with chimera memory controllers could be resolved more readily in the future if 3D stacking takes off.

I'd go a step further and guess that expandable RAM disappears altogether. Electricity costs are only going to rise in the future, and I imagine the energy savings on a large scale becomes quite significant.

There is also the issue of increasing memory density vs off-package bandwidth.

 

[nutball]

I'd go a step further and guess that expandable RAM disappears altogether.

This is possible. 4GB RAM + 32GB on-board PCI-E SSD for a page file and disc cache. Who'd notice the difference for the bulk of use cases?

 

[fellix]

Well, DDR4 already puts a limit on the DIMM slots per channel anyway. Once the solid-state storage becomes a mass, cheap (and reliable) commodity freed from the constraints of the SATA interface, would the PCs really need the gobs of expandable system memory?

 

[3dilettante]

For the average PC, 4 would probably be enough, possibly 8 to be safe.

There are still media apps that could gobble up RAM, which may leave non-professional or entry-level content creators in a lurch if the relatively inexpensive middle ground of the upper-range desktop with a load of DIMMs ceases to be and there is a wide gap between consumer platforms and the lowest rung of workstations that still have expandable memory.

 

[I.S.T.]

When the next consoles hit, RAM usage for games will go way, way up...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

4 wouldn't cut it. 8 would be barely enough. One of my consumer level apps is currently using 2.8 gigabytes of RAM. Games can take anywhere from 1.5-3.5 gigs of RAM on my system.

I currently have ~10 gigs of RAM in active use at the moment and I'm not even working...or playing a game.

Granted, I'm not your typical user, but I'd say going forward that 8 gigs is a better minimum. Especially if we ever want games to progress significantly in graphics fidelity. It's annoying to be basically stuck with the same texture resolution in games that we've had for 5-10 years now in the vast majority of games. And for those that try to actually increase texture resolution or world size, they are limited by the amount of memory they can use (I hope 32 bit systems die soon).

My biggest concern is that if this comes to pass. I won't have the choice to pair a high end CPU with a budget board. Or a budget/midrange CPU with a high end board.

While I haven't needed to upgrade my CPU this cycle (still using an i5-2500k and a launch MB) I've upgrade my memory 3 times already.

I'm just afraid that if something like that happens. Budget CPUs will only come with budget mainboards. Higher end CPUs will only come with expensive (not worth the money to me) mainboards, etc. As OEMs won't be able to support every potential configuration a user may want.

Again probably not a problem for most. But would have been a problem while I was building my HTPC/WHS machine. Only needed a budget CPU but needed a mainboard with LOTS of SATA ports and LOTS of PCIE slots. Which means I had to get a non-budget mainboard. A CPU and mainboard combination that may not exist if the CPU no longer comes in a socket.

Regards,
SB

 

[I.S.T.]

What consumer level app takes nearly 3 gigs of RAM?!

 

[entity279]

Opera with a few tens of tabs would easily eat that .

 

[CouldntResist]

Opera 11.50 here. 13 windows, 80 tabs total, 700 MB.

 

[entity279]

Depends on the sites. I had one example of local "newspaper" site that was eating lots or RAM on Opera.


But some programs tend to scale their memory usage with the size of available RAM (which is nice, ofc). So maybe that's what SB is experiencing. Looked to me that way in the very brief moments when my MB accepted a 32 gig config. New motherboard coming up now to fix that back.

 

[Davros]

Opera 11.50 here. 13 windows, 80 tabs total, 700 MB.

What!!! why on earth would you need 80 webpages open

 

[Silent_Buddha]

What consumer level app takes nearly 3 gigs of RAM?!

That particular example was for a usenet client. I've been using usenet since the mid-80's. And while it certainly is only a shadow of what it once was there's still some useful things there.

Opera with a few tens of tabs would easily eat that .

Internet browsers are also another one. Both IE9 and Chrome have hit greater than 4 GB of memory used at times. Virtual size being significantly larger than that, and non-private working size being somewhere in between.

The amount of memory taken is dependant on both the content of pages (lots of graphics = heavy memory useage as just one example out of many) and number of tabs. There's been times when I've had over 200 tabs open.

BTW - system instability starts to set in if your browser's virtual memory size starts to approach or exceed your installed physical memory size. Happens with both Chrome and IE9 for me.

Regards,
SB

 

[CouldntResist]

What!!! why on earth would you need 80 webpages open

Imagine your private garrage, always getting cluttered with stuff that "maybe" someday might be useful (or thrown out), but just not today. It's like queue, or buffer.

Also, I default to flash plugin disabled, so videos are loaded only on my explicit requests. Maybe that keeps memory usage lower.

 

[Malo]

So you actually use windows and tabs as bookmarks? That sounds horribly inefficient.

 

[Davros]

exactly as malo says and its the number, 80 pages (i could understand a few) , do you not close a page after youve read it

 

[3dilettante]

Regardless of the reasons for tab usage, it's not likely that Intel would significantly weigh production decisions worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the maintenance of a few users' extra dozens of Opera tabs.