The end of the road for the DIY PC?

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.

I've been upgrading my original system since 1987, and right now there's
no original pieces remaining on it, but I can trace each of the pieces
back in a chain to the original 8088 PC-XT clone that I had bought back
then. I suppose it was meant to happen, not many people build their own
PC's anymore, and it's been cheaper to buy a full brand-new system for
many years now rather than upgrading it.

Although this is just an Intel announcement, and AMD hasn't said it
would do the same thing, but I don't see AMD not following suit with
this, it'll help their financial situation too, and probably help them
even more.

I suppose you could keep upgrading if you buy a full new motherboard
alongside your CPU, you'd probably have to buy it with new memory also.

Yousuf Khan

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