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Today Anandtech had an announcement from Intel about a reduction to their desktop motherboard business with a ramp down planned over the next three years. This means that Intel will begin to bow out of this market slowly with an expected exit sometime around 2016. Intel will continue to work with third party manufacturers in the design and build of their boards including the development of reference boards for new form factors (like the one used for the Next Unit of Computing).  The question is; what will this mean to both Intel and the rest of the desktop market? In truth it means very little to the majority of the market, but it is significant in many ways.

We all know that Intel is launching a new CPU in the next few months to replace the 1366 socket and the X58 chipset. There is not a whole lot of detail around on this, but we can gauge the time of launch by the number of companies that are currently “launching” X79 motherboards.  If history is any indication we are within about 3 months of seeing a new CPU from the Blue Team.

Still things are a little different this time; when we saw the P55 and P67 launches the boards were flowing to the review sites and we had previews, unboxings, and everything in-between. We even had a stack of P67 motherboards about a month before the CPU arrived on our doorstep.  This time companies are being a little more… careful in how they send products out. I was not the only one to get buried under an avalanche of boxes right up to the actual launch date.

Now instead of flooding the sites with pre-production boards we are seeing the manufacturers themselves conducting the photo shoots and writing up the details. These are what the press has to talk about (unless you are lucky enough to get invited to a launch event at a company headquarters).  Still that is what we have to go on so that is what we will talk about now. So far we have heard from two of the larger competitors. Asus has pushed out their Rampage IV Extreme and shown it off to a select group of journalists. These lucky few got to see a board that while containing a complete BOM (Build of Materials) was not likely to work. Some have even been able to actual take a closer look at the board in person but those have been few and far between.

Manufacturers of hardware components are not expecting a significant recovery of the PC market over the next year. Asus and Gigabyte, both leading manufacturer of motherboards, have said that in 2013 they expect an equal or slightly lower number of deliveries of motherboards than was the case this year.

On an investors conference that Asustek hosted yesterday, company president, Jerry Shen announced that company sales have been beyond planned in Q2 of 2012. They achieved a new record in operating profits and profits before tax. They plan to ship out 22 million notebooks in 2012, and believe that the release of Windows 8 in the fourth quarter will be very important for their market results. According to Asustek there is a new wave of competition arriving at the end of the year that will reshuffle the rankings of tablet and notebook PC players. They announced consolidated revenues of $3.15 billion for second quarter, which is a 4% increase.

With PCIe 3.0 just coming on to the scene the PCI special interest group (PCI-SIG) just announced that they are planning on releasing PCIe 4.0 sometime around 2014-2015. Now that is assuming we all survive the Mayan apocalypse, but if we all do then it looks like the interconnects between the devices on our systems will get quite a bit faster. According to the press release, the new specification can move 16 “Gigatransfers” (is that even a word?) per second.