http://www.amd.com/us/aboutamd/corporate-information/executi...
They denied that, but even if they didn't why would soldered CPU -> death of non-intel motherboards? Third-party mobo designers already use plenty of soldered chips throughout the board (the chipsets, to start with — at least before most of them moved to the CPU)
As far as I know, the chipset manufacturer doesn't even get to decide how many GigE ports there are, the chipset provides a bunch of PCIe lanes and some of them are used to connect to the GigE chipset, most chipsets don't build GigE support in.
System-on-a-chip asics have been around for more than a decade (via makes quite nice ones), they're soldered on to the board just like every other chip and nobody cares.
Chipsets serve many purposes, mostly to do with buses and memory. Yes you could integrate chipset, cpu and ethernet controllers all into the same package. But in the end if you want to expand your computer you will be interfacing with a bus, not with the cpu or any of its internal registers directly.
So what you'll do to get more devices hooked up is to plug in some device into PCIx, USB or whatever the flavor of the day is.
You're not upgrading your CPU today to get more ethernet ports either. And if it's soldered onto the motherboard then that won't change one bit.
The reasons driving this are economical and practical, even if there are downsides too (such as shelf life and the amount of money invested in a component that exhibits severe price volatility).
The major upsides from soldering the cpu onto the mb instead of plugging it in are:
- shorter signal path
- cheaper (no expensive socket)
- increased reliability (bga alone vs bga -> socket -> cpu)
- more compact
- weight savings
stuff like: dual built in nics, IO virtualization, FB-DIMMs, Multiple PCI-e 16x slots, SAS ports, SATA 3.0 ports (have been implemented with a separate controller)
can be bought on boards that support cheaper CPUs, however as these are "premium" features, you can be certain they will be bundled with an expensive CPU only.