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I can't tell if end of the line is a good or a bad thing here?

Most likely bad. With Intel you tend to need a new motherboard anytime you upgrade your processor since they change sockets frequently. This also makes it harder to find replacement motherboards for old processors.

AMD has committed to the AM4 socket they're using until at least 2020, so if you buy a Ryzen processor and motherboard today, you should be able to use that motherboard with Ryzen class processors until 2020.

Wow, that's .. kinda opposite world from a few years ago. For the Intel chips, the socket remained consistent from the Pentium D all the way up to the Core2Duo. IIRC they had an offboard memory management unit, so the chips wasn't tied directly to a motherboard. The AMDs on the other hand had integrated MMUs and each new chip required a totally different board and the processors themselves were tied to the RAM type (DDR2 vs DDR3 etc).

Intel switched to the AMD model starting with the i3/i5/i7 series, now moving to an integrated MMU themselves.

Ah okay. Thanks. I have been an Intel guy for all the years now, so I was used to getting new motherboards.

Good to know AMD is doing that! Getting new motherboards is annoying.

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