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Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

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Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#63
post #61

D865PERL looks like it was built for a Pentium 4 in 2003. Its not like Intel is saying the board wont continue to work, just no bios updates. How often do you need to update the bios on a 16 year old system?

unfortunately the same applies here: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/28273/BIOS-Update-...

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#64
post #32

Not "ALL" BIOS drivers. Just legacy ones, for boards released in the 90s and early 2000s.

> Unfortunately, they'll be removing all BIOS download links to all Intel desktop boards on that very same date (even the later Sandy Bridge boards)

Mentioned in OP. No idea what the statement is based on, but Sandy Bridge is at least 2012'ish AFAIR.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#65
post #8

Why are they doing this?

Because supporting 15 year old cheap consumer products is a waste of energy.

Updating hardware probably uses more energy overall than supporting existing hardware with software, if you account for increased manufacturing for shorter product lifecycles.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#66
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is indeed cheap. Buying it through a service provider not so much.

Talking to my IT department, it seems the argument is that storage is only cheap in isolation. In the real world it aggregates across products, users and hierarchies. Example email: - I want bigger mailbox to handle bigger mails incoming and outgoing. Result: bigger mailbox. - Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000. - Also: bigger mail-server backups. - Also: bigger desk…

> - Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.

This doesn't have to be so. Some users have genuine reasons to require more mailbox storage. Not everyone has the same needs. And if 1000 users really need more space, then either they should be given the space they require, or they're doing something wrong that can be solved by technical means (like sending links to large files instead of the files themselves).

> - Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.

This can be configured to some extent.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#67

I wonder will Intel pull their drivers from Windows update repository? As far as I remember, since Windows 7, I generally stopped download drivers from hardware vendors, used Windows update.

What you get through Windows Update is just partial (but working) support, though. At least in my case my GPU, sound and chipset's main features run poorly with just the Windows Update drivers.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#68
post #31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me since we're talking about EOL software that won't receive patches in the first place. I can't think of any good reason to get rid of that besides maybe "we're revamping the website and can't be bothered to port that bit".

If you read more in the thread, Intel is also removing old gpu and nic drivers for currently supported hardware. There’s no other reason to do that other than to obstruct patch diffing.

Removing old files to prevent bad guys from getting their hands on them is utterly pointless if you announce the removal beforehand.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#69
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, my Brazos APU would welcome getting their OpenGL and video hardware decoding capabilities back to the level of fglrx.

I never understood why AMD did not push that angle more, it is an act that would be very hard to follow by Intel unless they bought NVidia or something extreme like that. It also would allow AMD to potentially gain an edge over NVidia in the GPGPU space. Missed opportunity imo, it still seems like an excellent idea.

AMD's market cap (44B) is much smaller in terms of market cap than either nVidia (124B) or Intel (251B), and pre-Zen they bet on mulitcore more heavily which lead to a decade of non-ideal hardware. As a result AMD didn't really have the money to dump into software for drivers and developer experience.

That said, they have been working on opening up the GPU space via ROCm: https://rocm.github.io

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