14 DAY TRIAL // Whether or not Intel will stop making LGA CPUs, or other sorts of socketed CPUs, in the years to come is a matter of some debate, and the believers just got some more food for thought.
Currently, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices design two sorts of central processing units: those that can be removed from the socket and changed, and those that are permanently stuck, soldered as it were, to the motherboards.
Late last year (2012), it came out that Intel was thinking of completely dropping changeable CPUs in a couple of years.
In fact, the timeline suggested the Broadwell release as the time when LGA is abandoned.
Some time after, the rumors were denied, and some of the panic abated. People still talked though, and it looks like LGA chips really might go extinct by 2016. The Tech Report said this, citing a source from a motherboard manufacturer.
On that note, details on Intel's Haswell and Broadwell CPUs emerged in late December.The information revealed in the leak only barely fits Intel's previous promise that Haswell won't be the last socketed CPUs and that such processors will be available “for the foreseeable future.”
For those that do not want to comb through another article, the bottom line is that Broadwell will have some Core i7 and i5 variants in socketed packages, but that's it. All the others will be BGA chips.
So what does this mean? That DIY PC market (do-it-yourself) will have much fewer options in a few years, since there will only be motherboard+CPU kits on sale.
The name of the Intel CPU line set for 2016 release is Skymont. Some have speculated that Skylake (2015) and Skymont (2016) will still offer socketed versions for Enthusiast/Performance markets, but the opposite may very well be true. No one knows for sure.