I hadn't thought about that... this certainly puts intel at a much nicer light.
In some ways it does, in some ways it doesn't. Like IDC said, Intel does a better job of managing the supplier ecosystem. Just goes to show that if a company like Intel doesn't try to profit off frequent chipset/platform changes, somebody else will.
@DrMrLordX: I agree with taltamir. That is a very unique insight you've shared. I have never looked at it that way. You are right. It is good for enthusiasts, but not so good for the OEM market.
I forget who mentioned in on these boards, but someone here said that they went out and looked at AMD OEM boxes and couldn't find 890GX chipsets in there, which was telling (I think they kept finding 765 or 770 chipsets, forget which). And by Jove they were right. I would give credit where credit's due but my memory isn't that good.
I will add to this by mentioning that one challenge for any board supplier is recouping their design investment...AMD makes their chips backwards compatible to increase the liklihood of existing AMD owners to upgrade their CPU since the rest of the deprecated system components can be recycled.
This destroy's the market potential for the mobo makers...so what are you going to do? Do you invest tons of R&D into developing a latest-gen AMD chipset board knowing that AMD is just going to release something that enables your customer from last year to avoid being your customer again this year? Or do you just keep on selling that mobo you designed last year in hopes of some day finally selling enough of them to have justified developing it in the first place?
Intel, by virtue of their socket-of-the-year-strategy, is a mobo makers dream. First Intel has massive market share, so your opportunity to sell larger volumes of any mobo you design is 4x higher than the AMD scenario. Second because Intel is doing their part to ensure your mobo's from last year are obsolete to consumers this year you stand higher chances of selling new boards to the same people who just bought one a year or two ago.
It's called the supplier eco-system, and Intel manages their supplier eco-system in a way that ensures plenty of wealth gets spread around every time someone buys a new Intel cpu because the upgrade path is rich with secondary purchase points. AMD manages their supplier eco-system in a way that stands to maximize AMD's revenue but doesn't really throw the supporting supply chain too many bones.
Neither strategy is superior to the other for everyone involved, obviously the consumer benefits with AMD's path but the employees of the supplier eco-system do not.
Good point. Intel really does even out the profiteering by making sure that anyone that wants to deal with current Intel hardware that's in the channel right now has to follow certain obvious rules by controlling supply and limiting the value of surplus. In AMD's world, it's OEM vs. board manufacturer vs. end user to see who can get a leg up over whom.
I see the potential advantages of intel's style, but there are clear advantages to AMD's way as well. As a MB maker you don't need to spend as much on development because when you do design a good board it will continue to sell for 2 or even 3 years because it's still usable on new CPUs, while a 2-3 year old intel board is useless and all that development cost needs to be recouped in the first year.
I don't know if that amounts to a real advantage or not. In the PC world, even if your design doesn't need to be updated, there will be plenty of pressures for you to want to update. New chipsets with new functions will appear, new process technologies will let you produce boards (either of your old design or a new design) at a lower cost, and so forth and so on.
From a raw business point of view, it behooves most mobo manufacturers to keep designing new boards and then selling those new boards.
Maybe if AMD had only one certified board manufacturer, that mobo maker could just sell an old 7-generation chipset board over and over and make a mint on not having to do anything because their old, good board supported every chip and everyone on the OEM and consumer side was happy. AMD might be miffed at being unable to sell 890GX/FX chipsets but oh well.
However, the reality is that there are plenty of AMD board manufacturers out there. If I'm trying to sell 890GX/FX chip-based boards and can't do so because OEMs are picking up somebody else's 7-gen board from surplus (read: not mine), then I can't sell my new 8-gen board, nor can I just make more of my old 7-gen board and expect to sell it because somebody else is already selling their 7-gen board. If I try to flood the market with more of my old boards to beat out the competition that's already letting OEMs bottom-feed, then I'm compounding the problem by dumping even more cheap product onto the market.
The real problem is that, in some fashion, there has formed a glut of AMD-based boards that will support the vast majority of AMD's CPUs from the last two years, and AMD hasn't provided any clear-cut way to get all that junk out of the channel. This makes it hard to bring new chipsets and new boards based on those new chipsets into the market.
What is the best Intel board? X58. When did it come out? almost two years ago (11/08)! Can we stop the FUD about a new MB every year? It is getting really old.
Yeah, but that's Intel's enthusiast platform. They haven't needed to replace that for obvious reasons, nor has the consumer particularly needed them to replace it, either.
I know that every X58 board will run every i7 quad processor, period.
First of all, no they won't. i7-860 won't run on an x58 board. But I'm just nit-picking.
You do realize that x58 has seen at most three processors on it, right?
Bloomfield, Gulftown, and Gulftown quads (Xeons only). And the 32nm Xeon quads for x58 are really just cut-down Gulftowns so in reality, x58 has seen two processors.
I can't even begin to count how many oddball CPU variants you can put on an AMD 770 board.
AMD's compatibility is much more suspect, and you can read the forums every day to hear how disgruntled people whine about how their $80 MB doesn't run the newest processor on the newest manufacturing process.
Mark put a Thuban on an $80 770 board (I think) and cranked it up to 4.2 ghz. The BIOS support was there. Any problems people are having with backwards compatability with Thuban lie at the feet of mobo manufacturers with their inability to supply a decent BIOS and/or build the board well enough to handle higher-wattage CPUs. In neither case is this intrinsically AMD's fault. For those that remember the Agena/AM2 fiasco, the transition from AM2+ to AM3 has been smooth in comparison.
I can see the argument both ways, but most people I know upgrade their CPU and MB together. If you are constantly buying new CPUs to replace your existing, your probably wasting more $$$ than someone who buys less often and also upgrades their MB.
This was more about the low-end OEM sector where people are going out to buy entire machines and are finding AMD machines with new(ish) CPUs and old(ish) motherboard chipsets. Many of these buyers wouldn't know better until after realizing that the OEM box they just picked up only supports SATA2 or doesn't have the latest and greatest IGP or what have you (and that's only if they ever noticed that).
The same low-end buyer on the Intel side wasn't shopping in the x58 realm in '08; they were still buying updated, low-end s775 stuff. Now they're seeing H55/H57 with Clarkdale. In a year or so they'll see Sandy Bridge i3 in the same consumer space on LGA1155. In many cases the buyer only knows about the latest CPU model (maybe) or that they just want the latest CPU in general, and if the OEM wants to give that to them and do it the Intel Way(tm), they've got to update the entire platform to present that to them.
x58 is on the boutique high-end in the OEM world which is much lower-volume and which operates by different rules.