It's the end of an era: Intel has announced that, over the next three years, it will wind down production of desktop motherboards to zero.
The company will continue to supply chipsets for use by third party motherboard manufacturers—the likes of ASUS, ASRock and Gigabyte—but after 2013 it won't make more motherboards itself, reports Anandtech. In fact, the last output from Intel will be 'boards that accommodate its soon-to-launch Haswell architecture chips (the successor to Ivy Bridge). It'll then wind down and not bother for its subsequent set of silicon.
Instead, it will focus its efforts on creating form factor reference designs: mock-ups that are used internally for testing, but which often also end up as the base for third-party products. There won't be any trimming here—so you can probably expect to hear of plenty of new ultrabook, tablet and desktop prototypes in the future. Comfortingly, none of this will see job cuts at Intel. Instead, engineers will be absorbed into other divisions.
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