while on the throne i thought of an idea how intel could get money out of enthousiasts without making them angry:
- have a somewhat seperate platform thats in between the regular desktop series, and the same-socket xeons.
- it has a switch to go between "rig" and "workstation" modes
- in "rig" mode it supports consumer chips and overclocking
- in "workstation" mode it supports xeons and enables ECC support
- have only one platform specific CPU, which is the same as whatever i7 is on the platform at that time
- said CPU is supported in both modes, and switches features along with the board
- instead of a power and reset switch, it has two power buttons, one for each mode
- each mode has its own bios settings, down to fan control and boot drives
- include on-board flash storage that allows you to store multiple bootloader partitions, and choose between them as boot options, or as backup and restore.
in essence, the idea would be its a platform that "by day" can be a fully certified workstation with ECC memory, and "by night" can be a sick overclocked gaming rig, and while there's only one chip that supports both sides, the platform isnt "married" to that cpu, because when only using one specific mode it can use the chips of two different platforms.
what's in it for intel:
- they can charge enthousiasts more for a niche chipset
- the section of workstation boards keeps to *actually workstation* boards, giving the enthousiast workstations their own category of crazy ideas.
- it saves them from people yammering about the desktop platform being locked out of xeons.
