If you own an Intel motherboard with a Z170 or Z270 chipset, you might believe that it only supports CPUs up to Intel’s 7th generation, known as Kaby Lake. Even the CPU socket’s pinout …
Intel is well known for requiring a new board for each new CPU generation, even if it is the same socket. AMD on the other hand is known to push stuff to its physical limits before they break compatibility.
But why? Did Intel make a deal with the board manufacturers? Is this tradition from the days when they build boards themselves?
I thought they just didn't care and wanted as little restrictions for their chip design as possible, but if this actually works without drawbacks, that theory is out the window.
Just another instance of common anti-consumer behavior from multi billion dollar companies who have no respect for the customers that line their pockets.
Intel also sells the chipset and the license to the chipset software; the more boards get sold, the more money they make (as well as their motherboard partners, who also get to sell more, which encourages more manufacturers to make Intel boards and not AMD)
There are many motherboard manufactors but only 2 CPU manufacturers (for PC desktop). Board makers don't "makes deals" so much as have the terms dictated to them. Even graphics card manufacturers made them their bitch back when multi-GPU was a thing - it was them who had to sell their Crossfire/SLL technology on their motherboards.
They've been pulling this shit since the early days. Similar tricks were employed in the 486 days to swap out chips, and again in the Celeron days. I think they switched to the slot style intentionally to keep selling chips to a point lol
i dream of a world where the process will cheapen out enough like pcb design, where you can just submit the design you want and they will fab it out for you.
with more players coming into the game because of sanctions, i hope we are now on the path.
Yes, i hope so too, as for now, semiconductor lithography at home is impossible due how big and complex these machines are, so i have same opinion as you are
IIRC, the slot CPU thing was because they wanted to get the cache closer to the processor, but hadn't integrated it on-die yet. AMD did the same thing with the original Athlon.
On a related note, Intel's anticompetitive and anti- consumer tactics are why I've been buying AMD since the K6-2.
They had integrated the L2 on-die before that already with the Pentium Pro on Socket 8. IIRC the problem was the yields were exceptionally low on those Pentium Pros and it was specifically the cache failing. So every chip that had bad cache they had to discard or bin it as a lower spec part. The slot and SECC form factor allowed them to use separate silicon on a larger node by having the cache still be on-package (the SECC board) instead of on-die.