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There are a few hurdles I can think of to longer motherboard lifespans. The most basic is that planned obsolescence is profitable for Intel through chipsets and for the board manufacturers themselves. Additionally, board manufacturers do not like having to develop and test lots of EFI updates that they are not getting paid for to support substantially different new generations of processors. Many board manufacturers already do not support all of the pin- and chipset-compatible processors that they could, in fact. Maybe they could make newer firmware profitable by selling it like game DLC, but besides the obvious pirating problem this seems too niche to be feasible. Processors of different generations operate in different voltage ranges, so motherboard voltage regulation would have to be more flexible - mostly in terms of providing good stability and granular enough settings as the voltage goes down with new generations. This could be addressed with good design and EFI updates, but again it's more work that would have to be somehow profitable. Most people never consider upgrading their old processor even when good options do exist, so this would mostly affect the niche of enthusiasts who started out buying high end. I feel like CPU updates alone might be a small bonus to old motherboards, but to be honest while it's the main reason to upgrade it's far from the only one. Memory bandwidth seems to double roughly every 5-6 years, so putting a new processor in an old board would be kind of like running single channel memory. Storage is in the middle of switching over to PCIe as an interface due to SATA being clearly insufficient to keep up with SSDs, but if you put a new processor in an old board you might be stuck with 300MBps SATA so you'd have to hope that your EFI updates give you the ability to boot from PCIe if you ever want to improve that. For that matter, you'd have to hope your board is new enough to actually have more than one PCIe slot and not be full of PCI ports which are largely useless these days. That's especially true if you wanted USB 3.0 too. Gigabit Ethernet was still pretty common 7-8 years ago, but on a cheap system you could totally have Fast Ethernet integrated so if you wanted to upgrade from that you'd need another card still. And like Arsten says, if you're OK with all of that then the old processor probably isn't much of an additional limitation anyway. For web/office/multimedia stuff a fast Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad is still not bad if you put it with enough memory and an SSD. Since Nehalem and especially Sandy Bridge, progress in sheer single-thread CPU power has slowed down anyway and Intel has shifted focus to power efficiency for the mobile sector and core count(+power efficiency) for servers. Desktops are caught in a land of small increases and added features, and so I'm still happy with my 2500K and going to continue that way at least until I see what Skylake-E and Kaby + Cannonlake have in store. Eletriarnation fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 00:15
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 02:39 |
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