Paul,
You summed this up nicely. Everything seems to go full circle with the computer industry. I came from the world of video terminals with mainframes and worked up to workgroup computers and local file servers. We've now gone back to a higher-end graphics terminal connected to a cloud server. From a corporate point of view, this is advantageous because of their ROI is very high. There is now very little support required - it breaks, pull out another one from the closet. The data is secure, being off the desktop and away from the user's hands so there is little chance of data theft, and there is less of a chance of malware intrusions because network access can be controlled.
In the 1980s I worked for Visual Technology, a pioneer in the early personal computers and advanced video terminals. Like the computers being developed today, their PC line (used to mean Personal Computer and not IBM-compatible PC), used a single motherboard. Nearly everything on these boards except for RAM, processor, a few ASICs and larger ICs was soldered on the board. For a corporate user and average home user,this was the way to go because the technician can easily rip the board out and fix the whole computer in one shot. As time has gone on, the manufacturing process has gotten better with improved surface mounting technology and smaller components. For manufacturers, having the CPU soldered on the motherboards, this only makes sense as this brings their manufacturing costs down because there are fewer components such as sockets and extra labor needed to populate them. By soldering the CPU on the board while everything else is done, this can save them a ton of money. For the average consumer, who never would upgrade anything anyway, this is no issue, and for the corporate user, this makes support life a lot less hectic for the technician because if a PC dies he calls the OEM or supplier for a new one.
With the development of SSDs, the hard drive as we know it is fading away. These too are a candidate for motherboard integration. Apple has already proven that with the soldered in SSDs and RAM on their motherboards. The problem today with SSDs is their paltry size compared to mechanical drives as well as their overall reliability on the consumer-side of the components where these cost savings would be most advantageous.
If anything, I don't think that the big custom PCs will go away completely especially in the server and workstation markets. These computers are expensive and a company would much rather spend a few hundred dollars on a processor than replace a workstation. For the enthusiast, we'll remain at this high end anyway because our computers are pretty close to those workstations and servers, and less like the average computer used by the home net browser and corporate user.
One thought has crossed my mind as I was typing this. Having the CPU integrated onto the motherboard may prove to be a good thing for enthusiasts as well. With sockets and other interconnections, there is a great amount of signal loss, causing bandwidth drops and the need to use lower speeds for stability. With the components integrated onto the substrate, this signal loss can be mitigated somewhat since there is no longer that connection issue between the processor and the rest of the motherboard. Intel has already done some of this already with the integration of the cache memory directly on the processor substrate. By using this technology, they have been able to give us higher frequencies because there is less signal noise from the interconnections between the processor and the static RAM.
John
