"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

Intel has announced that they will stop making replaceable CPU's after
Haswell. From now on, all CPU's are supposed to be in BGA packaging,
which means you can only attach CPU's to the motherboard by soldiering
them on. You won't be seeing these in any home DIY's toolkit, so it's
the end of the road for that upgrade mechanism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjKEmKUatJ4
and a whole bunch more at
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...=bga+soldering

What, you mean you don't have a heat gun in your electronic toolbox
along with the soldering iron, or hot air station sitting on the shelf?
The spouse will get ****ed if you don't cleanup the pancake griddle
after using it to remove and resolder the BGA parts. You must have
soldering wick, though. Just means you'll have to put those old-school
soldering techniques in your backstore memory and learn how to desolder
and solder BGA parts.

You're just spoiled by sockets that made it possible for home users with
no or destructive soldering skills to add components to a mobo. Maybe
the parts vendors are getting tired of the returns by boobs that don't
employ anti-static measures, overclock, overheat, or otherwise destroy
good parts. Soldering on the CPU, chipset, memory, and other components
would certainly up the reliability of the assembly while reducing
returns from ignorant, lazy, or sloppy users.

Intel¢s Haswell Could Be Last Interchangeable Desktop Microprocessors -
Report - X-bit labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...rs_Report.html

That wouldn't prevent first-time soldering of the CPU onto the BGA grid.
The mobo maker could just make a plastic frame to hold the chip in place
(both for position along with affixing to the mobo via spring clip) and
the user would use a soldering iron with a tip designed for the BGA grid
pattern. The user would buy the mobo they want, the CPU they want, and
then do a one-time solder of the CPU onto the mobo. After all, after
you buy the mobo and CPU and put them together, how often have you
actually replaced the CPU? Yeah, if the CPU goes bad then you have to
replace it but have you had to do so? When the CPU gets too old,
underpowered, or lacking in firmware features, do you really replace
just the CPU or do you replace the CPU, mobo, memory, and the whole
smash to upgrade to newer hardware?

Also, you can already buy mobo+CPU combos from online vendors. Most
times they pre-install the CPU so all you have to do is attached the
heatsink+fan (and sometimes you don't have to do that if you stay with
the stock HSF for the CPU). So instead of them sliding the CPU into the
ZIF socket for you, they'll have an inventory of pre-soldered
combinations and you pick one to buy.