Re: Cost Reduction From Soldered-on CPUs?

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:11:11 +0000, tony wrote:


"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ti8a221f70pg5vokpncufctleq8u0bmc84@xxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:17:01 GMT, "tony" <tonynews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

How much would soldered-on CPUs reduce the cost of motherboards?
In as much as memory modules seem to only work for one generation
of motherboards, how much would soldering on, say, 1GB of RAM
reduce costs? (By "reduce cost", I mean as compared to the total of
an equivalent motherboard with non-soldered-on CPU/memory).

You CAN reduce costs but soldering chips on motherboards, and this is
indeed done in some situations. However processors have long been a
differentiating point between many systems, and soldering chips onto
the system board complicates things a lot. As a general rule,
soldering chips onto your motherboard makes sense if you've got a
fairly specific application in mind (ie home theater computers
perhaps?) where a "good enough" level of processor performance is
sufficient and it's other features that really determine the worth of
the system, but otherwise you're probably better off with socketed
chips.

Not very convincing.

Now, as to how much money it actually saves? Well that's a tough one
to judge. The cost of the socket itself is pretty small, all things
considered. The real advantage would be that you could make a
somewhat cheaper and simpler package for the processor. However if a
company needs to make two versions of the chip, then this advantage is
rather lessened. So where does this leave us in the end? I really
don't know, but I suspect that you're looking at less than a $10
savings on components, possibly less than $5. Hence the reason why it
only really makes sense on the low-end of things at this time.

$5 or $10 indeed doesn't sound like much. But maybe in volume (Dell)?

$5 or $10 is a *lot*, when their margins are even lower. That $5 to $10
would quickly be absorbed by the additional cost of carrying the extra
inventory.

Of course, as the nature of computer's evolve, this may change. If you
look at gaming consoles you'll see that the processors are pretty much
always soldered onto the board. If, as many people have been
professing, gaming consoles and PCs are well along the process of
merging into one, then we may start to see a lot more "PCs" with
soldered processors.

Especially if small form factor becomes standardized.

You don't see any purpose in product differentiation?

The story is pretty much the same with integrated memory. Soldering
memory on-board would provide an even greater benefit here from
up-front cost savings and performance points of view, but also poses
even greater restrictions in terms of customizing of common PCs.
There's also the issue of warranty support. Where CPUs have very low
failure rates, memory has fairly high failure rates. Having to replace
a whole motherboard because a single memory chip has gone bad can
really eat into your up-front cost savings.

Yes, that would be bad. Hasn't memory become fairly robust these days
though?

Failures are really irrelevant. The market won't support your economic
model. Do you really think you're smarter than the *entire* PC market?

--
Keith
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Cost Reduction From Soldered-on CPUs?
    ... In as much as memory modules seem to only work for one generation ... an equivalent motherboard with non-soldered-on CPU/memory). ... You CAN reduce costs but soldering chips on motherboards, ... The cost of the socket itself is pretty small, ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips)
  • Re: Cost Reduction From Soldered-on CPUs?
    ... an equivalent motherboard with non-soldered-on CPU/memory). ... You CAN reduce costs but soldering chips on motherboards, ... The cost of the socket itself is pretty small, ... The story is pretty much the same with integrated memory. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips)
  • Re: Cost Reduction From Soldered-on CPUs?
    ... Any cost savings would be minumal. ... Given that the processor tends to be more expensive than the basic motherboard, this increases the inventory costs from the motherboard manufacturer to the system integrator. ... For memory, the same is true. ... Consider one motherboard, Pentium and Celeron processors, say, 4 different speeds for each. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips)
  • Re: Pimpin up a regular A7000
    ... a faster one (assuming one has the soldering capabilities) or is there ... motherboard, ... Acorn offered an A7000 to A7000+ upgrade servive it only cost about 250 GBP! ... changes documentation some years ago. ...
    (comp.sys.acorn.hardware)
  • Re: Ancient P3 - upgradeable?
    ... > or am I going to have to ditch that along with the CPU and motherboard? ... There are motherboards that use SDRAM and can take an Athlon XP, ... EBay and it'll probably pay most, if not all, of the cost of a gig of DDR. ... processor and memory out and replace ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)