Quote Originally Posted by lutjens View Post
It's been said before, but if this is the case, why bother with Ivy Bridge-E at all, which I read was going to be launched in 2H 2013?? It'll be nearly obsolete the instant it's launched.

Way to go Intel...way to screw the folks who pay for your top chips by demanding a high premium for obsolete hardware.

Fortunately, technology is improving to the point where the consumer-grade processors are making Intel's high end stuff more and more irrelevant for more and more people. PCI-E 3.0 makes the fewer lanes available on Ivy less of an issue and having new features like chipset supported USB 3.0 will sweeten the deal. Intel is slowly but surely poisoning their own prized cash cow, IMHO. This, combined with Intel's lagging position in the mobile market (in relation to other companies like ARM), is setting the stage for a significant comeuppance.

And Intel needs said comeuppance...badly.
Intel probably won't bother making a big deal about Ivy Bridge E, if they release it it'll just be to make cheaper eight core CPU's. If you think it's obsolete just don't buy it, people spending that kind of money should make educated choices. As for making the mainstream systems attractive I don't see an issue with this, you don't need to gimp mainstream to provoke high end sales, Intel chips are selling well on both fronts. On the subject of socket changes, Intel have been bring a lot more subsystem changes per generation so when you upgrade it's not just a faster chip.

As for the mobile market, when it comes to a fight against ARM, for a company that makes desktop chips Intel aren't doing too badly. ARM has a lot of advantages as far as manufacturers are concerned as they can just buy the design and build whatever they want around it. Intel aren't really going to follow this lead so it will always be an uphill struggle, to insure a sale, Intel has to make a chip and subsystem that can't be beaten on performance by almost everyone that has made an ARM based SOC. So I think it's brave for them to step into the market, but unless they can create a huge advantage it won't be theirs soon.