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Intel Hardware

Intel Pitches Modular PC Designs To Make Repairs Less Painful (theregister.com) 34

Posted by BeauHD from the wishful-thinking dept.
Intel is advocating for modular PC designs to improve repairability, reduce e-waste, and align with the right-to-repair movement. A trio of executives makes their case for such designs in a recent blog post. The Register reports: Intel's approach to the problem is to draft three proposals targeting different market segments, saying that a one-size-fits-all approach would not be able to address the nuanced demands of these varied segments. Those three segments comprise "Premium Modular PC" (actually a laptop design); "Entry/Mainstream Modular PC" (another laptop); and "Desktop Modular PC."

The first envisages a three-board system, comprising a core motherboard plus universal left and right I/O boards, the latter engineered to be common across fan-less Thin & Light designs with a 10W power envelope, and premium fanned designs for up to 20W or 30W. The Entry/Mainstream Modular PC is similar, with a core motherboard and left and right I/O boards, although in this segment, Intel says these can be redesigned to allow multiple SKUs of the design. The circuit boards are also cost-optimized here to cater to the mainstream segment, it says.

The Desktop Modular PC design appears from Intel's diagram to use a midplane that has the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) silicon, with other modules connecting to this. These include CPU, memory, and GPU modules, removable using slide rails, along with hot-swappable storage, all designed to fit inside a 5 liter desktop chassis. Intel also said it is introducing subsystem-level replaceable modules. In practice, this means something like a Type-C connector on a flexible printed circuit (FPC) or an M.2 circuit board. The idea is that the module can easily be swapped out if the port or connector is damaged.

Intel Pitches Modular PC Designs To Make Repairs Less Painful More | Reply

Intel Pitches Modular PC Designs To Make Repairs Less Painful

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  • Modules that THEY control? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday January 23, 2025 @06:06PM (#65113713) Journal

    ...Yellow alert, shields up!

  • Intel worried about eWaste? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Thursday January 23, 2025 @06:17PM (#65113741)

    Then they should fucking tell Microsoft to stop requiring artificial hardware requirements!

  • ...when companies did pro-consumer shit like this just because it was the right thing to do, or to differentiate themselves from the competition. Not because they were dying and needed an artificial injection of goodwill to stay afloat.
    What are the odds this modular standard will be open to all, no license fees? If and when Intel find their feet again, how quickly do you think they'll abandon it? You no longer have the consumer trust it takes to pull off shit like this, Intel.
    • What are the odds on a desktop a mundane part fails. Everything lasts forever with SSDs replacing spinning disks. Even an idiot can replace parts in a dell if something fails if you know what fails. If you built the desktop you know how to replace a part. The only âoehardâ thing to replace are laptop components but today ultra lights everything is soldered on so nothing to do but recycle it. Only the battery is serviceable. This article dumb
      • Not Necessarily. Video Games are a driver of consumer upgrades. Console development is about squeezing the maximum performance out of budget hardware, which includes soldered "Shared Memory", which moves in the direction of System on a Chip (SoC) architecture.

        Seeking a competitive edge, Apple has gone down the SoC path with its Apple Silicon. Microsoft has engaged Qualcomm for ARM CPUs in their flagship Surface product, and is actively maintaining an ARM flavor of Windows in the event of a significant ma
  • Like the NUC?

  • And I'm sure they won't encumber any of this with proprietary nonsense like they've done every single time they've tried to fundamentally shift physical PC design in the last 30 years either. Nope, no arbitrary restrictions on what can go where, and absolutely no license fees or refusal to license!

    Hey Intel: maybe get your own shit in order before you start dictating to the industry how to do their shit.

  • Back when Apple used Intel chips, their desktops were utterly fantastic for repair work. Every part just slid out for replacement, every slot was ready to take a new part just by sliding it right in.

    I'm no longer part of the Apple ecosystem but, the tech was just beautifully designed. I tend to suspect that they're not doing that anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      I'm surprised to hear that. Back in the early to mid PowerPC days i upgraded the RAM in a prof's Power Mac tower and it was like the thing was made of a frame of razor blades covered with plastic covers attached and attached with razor blades.

      (it's been a few decades so details are hazy)

      • I think that was the tower case. The 7500 desktop case used up to the beige G3 was really nice to work with. And so was the G4 tower. Pull the lever and the side hinges down.

  • Times must be hard... (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday January 23, 2025 @07:01PM (#65113857) Journal
    I assume that layoffs must have gotten some of their media people; but it's downright impressive for a company of that size to put out a promotional puff piece with a handful of illegibly tiny images that fail to make the difference between their idea and conventional laptops clear; and one uncanny valley stock photo of people repair 3.5in hard drives with screwdrivers and soldering irons, just like you definitely do these days.

    It's weirdly earnest for a joke, if it's supposed to be one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      Whaa?
      You mean you don't have 3.5", 2.5", and 5.25" drives (? what even IS that on the right side stack? )
      with their covers removed exposing platters and heads to the air that you're "repairing" all at the same time with what looks like plumbing diameter solder?

      While wearing a 1+ inch ring on your finger which absolutely won't scratch or short out anything while you're unscrewing things things because when does THAT ever happen?

      (my reaction to that picture was also to try to figure out if there's any conte

  • how is it not? you have a row of expansion slots you can put stuff in. You have bays you can put things like drives in. That's been modular since the 1980s.

    • Indeed. I have been building my own desktop PCs for over 3 decades. The last few years, there has been a major regression in computer cases. Most of them have stupid LED fans where the front drive bays should be, making it impossible to install things like optical drives, hotswap bays, front hubs, card readers, etc. I kept several very large Cooler Master HAF cases for that reason. The power switch broke on one of them. I wasn't able to fix it. Reset button was repurposed. There is no comparable case on th

    • My first thought exactly.

      From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Expandability
      One of the strengths of the PC-compatible design is its modular hardware design. End-users could readily upgrade peripherals and, to some degree, processor and memory without modifying the computer's motherboard or replacing the whole computer, as was the case with many of the microcomputers of the time

      So, Intel basically reinvented the original PC concept...from the 1980s. What a breakthrough!

  • Framework for laptops, NUC for desktops? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday January 23, 2025 @07:12PM (#65113873)

    So I've looked through designs in the blog and... seems like they are suggesting Framework-like modularity for laptops, and some kind of weird desktop NUC-like small form factor primarily defined by splitting current motherboards into multiple components rather than having a single one.

    I'm all for Framework-style laptops that have parts that are easy to replace upon failure so you can use the same laptop for as long as you like, only upgrading it piece by piece instead of buying a completely new one. But most people don't want to be laptop mechanics even on a minor level, so that is going to only find a limited audience. Most people just want to status signal with "newest shiny". So good idea for repairability and sustainability, but deters status-signalling and therefore likely not popular with overwhelming majority.

    And desktop idea just looks bad. Rather than opening a side panel and having full access to everything as is the case in current tower style designs, their compact plans suggest that a lot of things will require additional disassembly to get to. Not to mention all those things likely blocking air flow, so cooling would be a problem. I do agree with the idea of "custom i/o board" that attaches to motherboard, rather than motherboard where everything is already on board and you basically have to choose your i/o at the point of board purchase with minimal expansion ability latter without additional expansion cards and hubs. but you basically get that with USB hubs and PCI-E expansion cards already. So seems a bit like a solution looking for a problem.

    Hard to call that one, considering that I really dislike the "take it or leave it" concept of motherboard features like amounts of lanes given to each m.2 slot and where those lanes come from and i/o options being basically tied with each specific motherboard. Separating those into "buy a motherboard, and then buy i/o add-in board for it" would separate the two and allow for easier choice of "I need these kinds of lanes on those kinds of slots, also I need this much USBx and this much USBy and this kind of display output..." without having to go through hundreds of motherboards looking for that one that has the optimal combination you're looking for. Instead just buy the motherboard, and then buy a suitable i/o board that are interoperable.

    • There are indicators of stagnation in the x86 architecture. Apple shifting to their own ARM based silicon was seen as a significant disruption and unsettling of the dominance of Intel and x86. This is further exacerbated by recent hardware issues, and the lack of significant gains over 9th Generation console hardware suggesting the end of Moore's Law for enthusiast consumer purposes.

      The excitement of "newest shiny" is in the "laptop mechanics" of the Apple Silicon line. Perhaps more "smart phone" mechani
  • How is this at all superior to the existing form factors? Mini-ITX is very well suited to the corporate desktop that needs to run email, web & office. ATX cases aren't going anywhere for gamers. Laptops are always going to be fairly customized to fit into some ridiculously small case, and then arc-welded shut to make them pretty much unserviceable. Intel making a standard for this is pretty much like Bentley trying to license a standard chassis for an economy car.

  • Give me a standard case, a standard backplane, and standard cartridges that plug into it. Cartridges EVERYWHERE.

    • What wouldn't be bad is a passive backplane. CPU board goes in one slot, GPU goes in another, the drives go into a third, and even multiple CPU boards can be used with each computer being able to see and communicate with things, similar to a rack and blade system, except scaled down a bit. This way, if someone wants to have multiple computers in an enclosure (one for gaming, one work stuff, one general home), it would be easy to do, and with a smart drive controller that can take hard drives and SSD, opti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JimMcc ( 31079 )

        Harkens back to the S100 bus days.

      • I'd like to see it one step further and have the backplane as a network where one can plug in as many parts as one wants.
        Something like "Everything Over IP".
        When I saw external videocards on USB, I was already contemplating a NUC with USB disks in RAID/Ceph for storage and the videocard as a replacement for a media server or (gaming) PC.

        • We used to have network servers that would take graphics commands and stream back 4k video. Those, and eGPUs were awesome, mainly because they allowed a fairly lightweight device to run heavyweight games when at home, and without needing a subscription.

      • Passive backplane PCs are and always have been readily available (for every bus so far except maybe VLB) but more expensive because of the limiting form factor. The motherboards are cramped. They also tend to be built to industrial standards because they're used for industrial control or telephony.

        What they have not AFAIK so far allowed is multiple CPU boards. What would make that convenient is virtualizable hardware. I hear that is possible with AMD GPUs these days; Nvidia charges for it and also only supp

  • Wondering when will Intel think about a socket type of processing unit one can change without thrashing the entire motherboard. Or to get memory as needed. Or storage as needed. Or adding new features to their systems.

    Kind of like the opposite of an Apple device, really.

    • The opposite of current Apple devices. The Apple 2e had seven open slots and a dedicated memory slot. You could set it up the way you wanted. You could even get video out of the memory slot. Look up the Ramworks expansion card.

      The balance between built in interfaces and add-in cards has been tilting to built-in for a long time. Maybe it shouldn't have. I added a SATA card and a USB 2 card to my G4 Mac long ago. The video card was replaceable too.

      My main machine has three PCI-e slots which are empty. The bui

  • An awful lot like the Intel NUC platform that they just sold to Asus. It seems like they're basically just creating a new small form factor PC with new Intel custom connectors.

    The space that they're allocating for the "GPU module" also looks pretty puny. I can't imagine being able to fit a high end NVidia GPU in that space, and even one of Intel's new mid-range GPU's might need more thermal headroom. This might work as an office PC, but not much more than that.

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