Like it or not, nonreplaceable CPUs may be the future of desktops

I almost always upgrade both CPU and motherboard when it is time to do it. There has always been enough progress in both areas to justify that. Buyers will have to evaluate whether the the CPU / MB combination is a good match for their needs. But they should have been doing that all along. I don't see this as a big deal as long as buyers look at their real needs.

Having an upgradable CPU has, for as long as I can remember, always been a huge, huge, advantage for people who wished to initially purchase something within their budget, but have in mind, the option of power upgrades as their need or affordability, improved. For instance, as a DIYer, you might buy a motherboard which used the CPU socket that gave you those choices (say for example, the LGA2011 socket), but you couldn't afford the top of the range CPU, so you skimped on the processor, then, when prices tumbled (as they always do), you upgraded. It's like saying that you may as well hard solder a HDD in, the memory (like Apple now do), etc, etc. The term 'walled garden', easily comes to my mind here.

Think lower overheads, more sales - with higher value add (due to the need to purchase complete motherboards) , and increased profits.

AmyT wrote: Having an upgradable CPU has, for as long as I can remember, always been a huge, huge, advantage for people who wished to initially purchase something within their budget, but have in mind, the option of power upgrades as their need or affordability, improved. For instance, as a DIYer, you might buy a motherboard which used the CPU socket that gave you those choices (say for example, the LGA2011 socket), but you couldn't afford the top of the range CPU, so you skimped on the processor, then, when prices tumbled (as they always do), you upgraded. It's like saying that you may as well hard solder a HDD in, the memory (like Apple now do), etc, etc. The term 'walled garden', easily comes to my mind here.

But... but... but...

... if you keep those old-fashioned, swappable, socket-attached CPUs, and RAM, and stuff, then electronic devices will end up being maybe a whole millimetre thicker ! (And that would be really, really awful!)

"Think lower overheads, more sales - with higher value add (due to the need to purchase complete motherboards) , and increased profits."

...and we all know what usually happens when a manufacturer pursues a direction that the consumers don't want to take; sure! some will go there, but typically, someone else is looking to increase their own market share and will follow the popularity route.

"Replaceable CPU's" would make the Raspberry Pi impossible.

Quoting:"Replaceable CPU's" would make the Raspberry Pi impossible.

And it also seems to be pretty popular, so maybe manufacturers are already following the popularity route

I've always had the intention of upgrading my CPU, but usually by the time I do, there's no point in doing so. The only way it's ever been cost effective to upgrade the CPU was if I bought it on ebay. Memory on the other hand has often been a good upgrade.

> I've always had the intention of upgrading my CPU, but usually by the time I do, there's no point in doing so.

That's always been the case for me too. The only time a socketed processor has been helpful was when the motherboard died in one machine and the processor was still good. I was able to give the processor to someone else whose processor had died and had the same generation of motherboard.

Memory and hard drives are usually far more effective upgrades for most people. Of course, for most people the most effective upgrade would be the OS, but...

There is a hidden danger to soldered CPU's that hasn't been mentioned here yet. With a socketed CPU, you get to choose which mainboard goes with it. Do you want ATX, micro-ATX, more USB ports, more SATA ports or whatever? There is probably a mainboard out there that has it. Since the CPU can be added separately, you get to choose the processor speed as well.

Now look at a pure soldered CPU world. Since you can't mix and match motherboards and processors at will, motherboard vendors would have to produce the same set of motherboards as before, but multiply it with every type of CPU and speedgrade that fits a motherboard model. Even if there is only one type of CPU, but it has 8 speed grades, it would blow up the SKU's from 1 to 8 (assuming that binning stays in place). I don't see that happening.

What will most likely happen is that there will be 3 options per CPU line. A low power one, a mid-section one and a high-end one. The low power wil be just that, low power but not much else. The mid-section will be what will be deemed enough for the mythical, average user and be reasonably affordable, but crippled feature wise. Then there will be the high-end option. It will probably carry all the goodies at an insane processor speed, but it will cost an arm and a leg.

So even if you upgrade the motherboard at the same time as the processor, you will want the options the socketed world gives you.

@r_a_trip

That is exactly the problem I have with non-socketed CPUs. Of course the specifics of how it will limit our choices are speculation, but the principle that it has to limit our choices seems hardly possible to deny.

Will it reach a point where powerful mini-boards with RISC based processors become so ubiquitous that we don't have to be concerned about full-sized desktop computers anymore ? (And I have a mini-android box hooked up to my TV as well as Raspberry Pi on its way to me, so I'm certainly interested in these types of machines.) Perhaps someday, but until that time comes, I'm glad to have choices when I put together another desktop machine.

The problem with current computing technology is the monolithic nature of it. Why do we need (relatively) overpowered dekstops and laptops? Simply because current machines have to make do with their own processing power. There is no easy built in clustering in todays computing devices.

If I could easily chain all my computing devices together to form a cluster, I wouldn't need all that overkill on my desktop. Disregarding all the hurdles with instruction sets, programming languages and other assorted showstoppers, it would be nice if I could just tell one machine, for example, to transcode a video and have my "connected pool of processing power" sort it out amongst them to deliver my transcoded video in the least possible time.

I could see my house stuffed with a lot of low powerboards, tucked away out of sight, silently working together to meet computing demands. One can dream...