Intel Corp. on Tuesday said it would gradually ramp down its desktops mainboards business in order to concentrate on mainboards for emerging PC form-factors. The company plans to completely shut down its desktop mainboards business in three years’ time and will cease development of any new solutions later this year.

“Intel’s desktop motherboard business will begin slowly ramping down over the course of the next three years. As Intel gradually ramps down its motherboard business we are ramping up critical areas of the desktop space including integration of innovative solutions for the PC ecosystem such as reference design development, NUC and other areas to be discussed later,” said Daniel Snyder, a spokesman for Intel.

Even though Intel’s mainboards have been around and widely available for many years, they could not truly offer better performance or feature-set compared to premium solutions from companies like Asustek, Asrock, Gigabyte or MicroStar International. Still, in some cases Intel enabled innovative desktop platforms with its own mainboards; for example, Intel was one a few suppliers of dual-socket mainboards for Skulltrail platform several years ago. In fact, innovative platforms are some of the things that Intel is going to continue addressing. The internal talent and experience of twenty years in the boards business is being redistributed to address emerging new form factors – desktop and mobile – and to expand Intel’s form factor reference design (FFRD) work and enable its partners to develop exciting new computing solutions.

Intel stressed that the desktop segment continues to be a major focus for Intel with hundreds of products across many sub-segments and applications. Intel expects the broad and capable desktop motherboard ecosystem to fully support Intel’s growing roadmap and large worldwide customer base.

“Intel’s desktop motherboard business will not develop any new Intel branded desktop motherboards after completion of Haswell-based 4th generation Core i launch products in 2013 and will continue to support all products sold through the warranty period included with the specific product,” added Mr. Snyder.

By: DocMemory
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