Fine, lets analyse.
Sure, im not convinced we will see it but it is a solution, it wouldnt be all that difficult for Intel to do this, there are enough reserved pins in the existing sockets to just rev the socket. 2011v3 much? No I dont think we will see it happen but that is one solution.
99% of consumers don't care about 10G ethernet.
As I said, not necessarily but even if it did thats not a huge problem, Intel rev sockets every couple of years. If they thought there was a competitive market advantage then releasing a new socket to support new functionality isnt exactly ground breaking stuff.
Why not, there is already large amount of other stuff already integrated into the CPU, this doesnt seem like an impossible engineering challenge to overcome, in fact, it seems like an already solved problem for a whole host of high speed I/O. Its also a solved problem on other architectures that do put 10G on-die (Modern Sparc comes to mind) and a number of Intel's own SKU's as you so righteously pointed out over and over and over again.
Who care substantially more about 11ac than they ever will about 10GBase-T
You mean like building w/ an mATX board and a 10G PCIe card. Do you want an integrated solution as part of your motherboard or do you want a replaceable solution that you can dump if / when it fails?
So if it doesnt have a socket you cant reuse it later. excuse me whilst i go pull a bunch of servers out of circulation and send them to the e-waste place, they were used a few times before in other systems & have BGA CPU solutions on them. how did i not know this rule?
My argument against it were links to a multitude of boards that have done exactly this. I didnt say it was easy, i said it was a mostly solved problem from an engineering angle, as evidenced by the fuckton of boards that have already solved it. Building the ISS also wasnt easy and also is a mostly solved engineering problem.
Not that this is the argument I was making but just to be clear, thats not an engineering problem, its a market one.
The problem isnt one of engineering, Its one of addressable market and cost. I was never suggesting anyone should buy any of those boards I linked and use them as their daily driver. I was suggesting that those boards demonstrated that 10G on mITX is entirely feasible. For sure they make other compromises but at the end of the day, they have solved the engineering problem of putting 10G eth on an mITX platform. We can put cold cathode lighting and individually addressable LED arrays into sticks of RAM, an engineering problem that was almost universally considered unsolvable right up until vendors decided it was a thing consumers would want. At the end of the day if board makers believed there was a competitive advantage to bolting 10G NICs to their mITX consumer boards then they would do it tomorrow. If Intel thought there was a competitive advantage to doing the same w/ their consumer CPU SKU's then they would enable the functionality tomorrow. The problem isnt engineering, its addressable market and cost to consumers for functionality most of them dont careabout.
Also, whilst I didnt address this directly above it occurs to me that 10G phy cant be that hot as you mentioned to implement on a chip. Intel are bolting them to 16 core CPU's and keeping them at 35w. Sure older 10G chipsets ran hotter than the surface of the sun, also an engineering problem thats been solved. As the tech matures and the processes gets smaller power draw goes down. Was only a few years ago that no one could put 10GBase-T into and SFP+ module because the power draw was too high, then it got lower, now you can pick those modules up for cheap.
Mod Edit: Post edited to comply with community standards.
