It depends on maintainers though. We now kick devices out of coreboot where we suspect that the code wouldn't even boot anymore and there's nobody able to prove otherwise.
We'd certainly welcome them moving to coreboot. They might even gain a new feature or two, but there's work involved on their part (and the story usually ends at that point).
A future someone can resurrect that code via git. A future someone who wants to interact with old BIOS code that Intel just deleted doesn't have that chance.
It seems like for new motherboards it's be easier to start with coreboot over status quo. Are there reasons this isn't true or does it come down to marketing reasons?
I almost wonder if archive.org could get involved here, as these sorts of things (specifically including graphics drivers) will be a prerequisite for some forms of digital preservation and retrocomputing.
See https://www.archiveteam.org - they've done such things before, and they do post their work to the IA. And yes, this is something where they should be involved.
Yeah, I've been buying Intel for years but just today I installed some Intel software and it asked me to join their "Computing Improvement Program." Part of the program? Send the "categories of websites you visit" back to Intel, among other things. [1]. They're really trying my patience with the semi-constant stream of Speltdown-like issues.
They're worried that you visit HackerNews, AMD.com and Phoronix. Intel should focus on getting their house in order and produce better hardware rather than to spy on their users.
To add to the other commenters, gp is likely also referring to the MDS issues, of which there are many. Here's a decent link (highlighted the latest major one): https://mdsattacks.com/#ridl-ng
If they don't reverse this decision, I very much hope they keep hashes of the driver exe's on their site. If I need to update BIOS there's no way in hell I'm trusting a link from a random stranger on the internet.
Intel would basically be encouraging people to violate their copyright. Remember that technically, only Intel has the rights to distribute their software.
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with using alternate channels for media which is legitimately unavailable by any other means.)
I've built three systems with Intel desktop boards, and only one of them survived longer than three years; the other two succumbed to Bad Capacitor Syndrome. I wonder if the caps were counterfeits, since they were (at least ostensibly) from respected Japanese manufacturers.
The survivor is a D945GCLF2 (Mini-ITX Atom board) that runs my Asterisk installation. Even it's a bit wonky, though; kernels newer than 2.6 have a weird ACPI issue that crops up when the CPU temperature is above 71 C (which normally only happens when I'm compiling a new version of Asterisk). No BIOS or kernel fix is forthcoming.
If it wasn't for the expensive-to-replace PCI telephony card, I'd chuck it for an AMD-based Mini-ITX.
FYI there are still LGA1551 and AM4-based boards with PCI slots available, at least in mATX and ATX form factors. So you could potentially replace it with a modern board if you wanted.
It might be worth looking at some of the pcie to pci risers out there, you can find them for about $40-50, and you can likely get much better power efficiency on modern CPUs and platforms. That'd give you more time on a UPS along with better power bills (though likely not enough to recoup costs alone)
I'm not asking for support. If I have a problem, I don't expect to be able to call Intel and ask for help. All I'm asking is for some way to update the BIOS without hunting down unofficial download links from shady websites.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 15, 30, or 70 years old. These are not large files. Keeping up some old downloads should not be too much to ask of Intel.
If Intel would like to release all copyright claims to their old BIOS's and officially (!) designate the Internet Archive or a similar organization as their new caretaker, I'd be fine with that, because I'd know where to go if I ever needed an old BIOS. What I do not want is to have start hunting down links from malware-infested file-hosting sites.
Most of them in my experience. Many industrial machines have lifespans well beyond 15years. Big companies buy the state of the art and when they decide to replace the old machines they resell them to smaller companies who can't afford to buy the newest model.
I know many people on HN work in web technologies where last year's technology is already obsolete but I've worked in small hardware companies that still used industrial equipment controlled using a serial keyboard with a DIN connector and a monochrome CRT. I've seen people order parts for 20+yo industrial soldering ovens.
You can't really tell somebody with a highly expensive, perfectly functioning industrial machine that they have to buy a new one because you can't find the driver for the motherboard of the controller.
Back in my IT days we used a laptop that had a windows NT 4.0 sticker on it (running windows 2k) to run the ID printer that printed company IDs. These kinds of setups aren't that uncommon. At small scale it's easier and cheaper to keep old stuff running than to migrate.
I work in Manufacturing IT, I can confirm that there is considerable legacy equipment. Thing is, these machines typically cost more than a house, some as much as $2.5M+ dollars. Would you demo your house and rebuild in 20 years because of a leaky roof? These machines are mortgaged the same way, the bank secures the asset. They will work for 20+ years if you maintain them, and continue to produce.
Basically all scientific research labs use some equipment running windows xp or older because the drivers can't be installed on modern windows for one reason or another. Controllers for things like spectroscopy, electron beam microscopes, centrifuges, etc. Custom control boards are also common in industrial (oil, gas, chemical processing) applications.
I once spent an internship running a fluorescent dye laser operated by an computer running DOS (maybe MS DOS?). It was terrifying, but the beast worked perfectly well.
And my PhD lab was using mass-spectrometers that still required vacuum tubes.
Companies other than Intel are continuing to pursue irrelevance for industrial or high-stakes operations themselves.
Sometimes you've got to have a Bozo when a competitor or associated business has one or more Bozos in a decision-making position.
Just to be seen as competitive or up-to-date.
Apple and especially Microsoft made more money from anti-recycling after they pushed it into a position where the original superior engineering was not as lucratrive for the shareholders.
Users should be grateful since they were not squeezed more thoroughly even sooner.
Sandy Bridge is not the newest microarchitecture generation of the processors Intel made motherboards for. That's Haswell series (Q87, B85 chipset branding went with this)[1], launched in June of 2013. Boards like DQ87PG, DH87RL, DB85FL.[2] These also have the same notice of end of bios availability.[3]
The common problem with supporting old software and tools is that the poor bastard who maintains it is expected to watch all of their coworkers get to use new tools and fix old problems and they get nothing.
It's entirely possible they aren't even backporting support software like the build tools.
When you are supporting a large number of old versions, it becomes difficult to keep all the quirks and variance straight. On one team where we were only talking about supporting about 4 versions, and were already seeing friction. I was stumping for splitting up the responsibilities across multiple engineers, so that everyone was responsible for knowing the current version, and only one old version, but I don't think the other people saw the trap I was trying to route us around.
When did this feature come into the app? 1.2? 1.3? 2.0? I dunno, but I know it was after 'my' version (1.1).
It is still cheap, even when bought through a service provider, even after adding backup storage, and after adding any overhead incurred by having more data. True, it costs more than the $0.02/GB that a cheap, large spinning rust drive costs - perhaps a factor of 10 or 100 more, and perhaps billed monthly instead of as a capital expense.
It's cheap in comparison to the data that a business is saving. That's really expensive data. The people that created the data cost thousands of dollars per month. It would be stupid to save $0.02 if there's even a small chance that someone will need to spend $200 to rewrite a document or reverse engineer some information that they had in an email from a couple years ago. While some data - an installer for 3rd-party software, or photos/video - is pretty large, a single config file or code file that may have been perfected over months or years is just a couple kB, and it's hard to keep the latter useful without the former. And if a customer's $100,000 installation goes down for an extended period of time because you deleted their backup images to save space? You're not getting another order like that from them.
Talking to my IT department, it seems the argument is that storage is only cheap in isolation. In the real world it aggregates across products, users and hierarchies.
Example email:
- I want bigger mailbox to handle bigger mails incoming and outgoing. Result: bigger mailbox.
- Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.
- Also: bigger mail-server backups.
- Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.
- Also: bigger storage needs for anything also interacting/duplication selected mail (like CRM, import services, whatever).
- Also: bigger backups needed for all those systems.
- Etc etc.
And IMO it's a perfectly valid claim.
Maybe storage "only" costs $0.1 per 100GB in isolation (or whatever), but for a full company with all systems involved, in aggregate it quickly it may exceed 1000x that.
> - Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.
This doesn't have to be so. Some users have genuine reasons to require more mailbox storage. Not everyone has the same needs. And if 1000 users really need more space, then either they should be given the space they require, or they're doing something wrong that can be solved by technical means (like sending links to large files instead of the files themselves).
> - Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.
That's a silly argument for something like bios files that would take up less than 0.1 to 1% of the size of current storage that they are maintaining and which will only grow. They're not backing up email and desktops here, we're talking about drivers and bios. It's like comparing grapes and watermelons.
But old stuff tends to be adorably small compared to new stuff. I doubt the sum total of intel’s legacy firmware update collection exceeds the capacity of a ten year old piece of spinning rust.
For anyone on Windows stuck doing this, I've had decent luck with the Snappy Driver Installer. (https://sdi-tool.org/)
The project is open source, can store a complete collection of all drivers offline, and can detect and update drivers. Please do note that you should always take a system restore point, as I have had a few issues with graphics drivers installed with the tool in the past.
Unfortunately, I think that's their true intent...
But "potentially infected" is mostly paranoia scaremongering, unless you deliberately go for the ad-encrusted huge-flashing-download-buttons sites(and probably even those are OK) --- there's plenty of other community-based sites (like the one linked here) which I've used before for various software, and I'd say a lot of times I trust the community even more than "official" sources. Especially when the latter has commercial interests to uphold.
> It appears to be even worse. They're also removing old graphics drivers (and maybe even something else )from their website too, and that is bound to happen even earlier, the October 11th.
I feel like there was a period of time around 2000 when they had some edge, at least with gamers. Soon after that they disappeared for a while and only now i'm hearing about them again.
I remember the K8, Almost every gamer I knew had one. Everybody was rooting for AMD at the time. They were the king. Dual core, 64bit support, almost double the IPC of Intel, lower power than Intel, and more stable. The frequencies weren't as high. My 2.6Ghz Athlon 64 3700+ demolished many Intel CPU's. And then I remember when Core2Duo became a thing like you said. Completely ruined AMD in every benchmark. I believe that Intel had switched their architecture over to what was Pentium Mobile at the time and refactored it. Prescott was optimized for frequency, but the IPC was terrible, as was the heat. We had 4GHZ CPU's back in 2004.
Yep. The original Athlon and Opteron was the only decent period of time when it seemed like they had a decent edge. Really because Intel so horribly botched P4. So much so they buried the Pentium name they spent billions building up.
AMD never really made boards. That was part of their problem for a long time. They didn’t even make or support chipsets. It was just VIA and other third party stuff that was so riddled with bugs it was hard to recommend for anything other than enthusiast gaming.
nVidia was rarely competing on their merits in the chipset space.
They were popular on AMD because the other options were spotty at best. I loved my SiS 735 and ULI M1695 boards, but virtually nobody touched the chipsets-- almost exclusively second tier manufacturers. VIA was the leader before nVidia hit, but they had a long string of half-baked launches... you had to assume that you'd wait for the second-revision chipset.
On the Intel side, the only place they competed was in a specific enthusiast gamer segment. The nForce 780i chipset was hot running and unpopular, but people bought it because they wanted to run SLI. I srtill have one sitting around, from a "gaming PC" I fished out of a dustbin The heatsink on the chipset is comically large and cries out for a fan.
I never understood why AMD did not push that angle more, it is an act that would be very hard to follow by Intel unless they bought NVidia or something extreme like that.
It also would allow AMD to potentially gain an edge over NVidia in the GPGPU space. Missed opportunity imo, it still seems like an excellent idea.
AMD's market cap (44B) is much smaller in terms of market cap than either nVidia (124B) or Intel (251B), and pre-Zen they bet on mulitcore more heavily which lead to a decade of non-ideal hardware. As a result AMD didn't really have the money to dump into software for drivers and developer experience.
That said, they have been working on opening up the GPU space via ROCm: https://rocm.github.io
Stories like these is why I have the habit of archiving all manuals and software related to devices I buy, from motherboards to security cameras. Internet does forget.
What you get through Windows Update is just partial (but working) support, though. At least in my case my GPU, sound and chipset's main features run poorly with just the Windows Update drivers.
> Note that they are actively removing files, they removed near 200 between the time I scraped the links and the time I started the downloads... shits going fast.
D865PERL looks like it was built for a Pentium 4 in 2003. Its not like Intel is saying the board wont continue to work, just no bios updates. How often do you need to update the bios on a 16 year old system?
3 years ago I needed a "beta"[1] BIOS update for my 2012 Ivy Bridge motherboard because it shipped with EFI and every NVIDIA GPU since Pascal (2016) only works in UEFI mode. That machine is still perfectly good for modern games. If I had chosen to upgrade my GPU later and Gigabyte did the same as Intel now, I would be SOL.
[1] Gigabyte used to mark BIOS updates as "beta" when it's past their time (in 2012 Gigabyte terms: a year) to provide less warranty & support in case something goes wrong. They're as stable as the main versions.
I'm running a DH87RL with the 2018 BIOS. It's pretty remarkable that they released those updates after 6 years of nothing, though they only changed the CPU microcode. With the number of CPU vulnerabilities being uncovered recently, they're probably deleting the BIOS files because they're tired of maintaining the microcode patches.
Good point, but buying a new mainboard often also means buying a new cpu. I dont think you will be able to fit any of Intels current cpus in the EOL motherboards.
If you read more in the thread, Intel is also removing old gpu and nic drivers for currently supported hardware. There’s no other reason to do that other than to obstruct patch diffing.
Wouldn't simply not providing old versions of the driver achieve the same thing then?
And beyond that, what's the logic? "We don't want black hats to diff our patches so we make sure that the legit users can't get patched firmwares in the first place"? Doesn't really add up to me. People with enough knowledge, time and resources to pull such an attack will manage to get the binaries one way or the other.
I still think that incompetence and laziness are more likely causes.
This was my first thought as well, although I never expected Intel willing to resort to such low tricks since it indicates they don't care at all about their customers. I would expect that move from a used car shady salesman, not from Intel: there are businesses out there that would be forced to ditch perfectly working hardware just because of this. I'll surely consider moving elsewhere in the future.
That's pretty shortsighted then. The only thing this will do is drive those sales to the competition. The people who are using this hardware are likely not doing so by choice so if you cut them off and force them to re-invest they will not be bitten the same way twice.
Updating hardware probably uses more energy overall than supporting existing hardware with software, if you account for increased manufacturing for shorter product lifecycles.
HP made the same thing for desktop printers. Want to download a windows xp driver for an older printer (which is perfectly fine)?? not gonna happen from the hp site...
Microsoft did a similar thing silently to their downloads[1] and KB articles, but fortunately the majority of it --- if not all --- has been archived somewhere.
Now if only archive.org would make it all searchable...
[1] a notable example being "Calculator Plus", a 9x/2K/XP-style calculator with some enhancements, but the name has since been reused for a horrible bloated and slow buggy "app".
Windows Live Mail (the replacement for Outlook Express) is a good example. My dad uses it on his old Dell desktop, and it got carried over when he got hit with the Windows 10 dark pattern "upgrade".
Now he has a new laptop, but we can't download Windows Live Mail (unless we want to risk getting it from a dodgy site), and he won't even consider Thunderbird. Argh.
If the download is digitally-signed by Microsoft, you can download it via a temporary VM and verify the installer signature. Since Live Mail is around the Vista era it should be signed.
Is this due to a "management" style leadership pushed on companies typically by Private Equity? I am beginning to see PE as an agent of eroding quality in after sales support and many other areas.
Given that 10+ year old boards are still perfectly serviceable for many applications and are still in widespread use all over the globe they may be End Of Life for Intel but that does not mean they are magically and suddenly all gone. The degree to which Intel stuff has proven to be insecure over the last couple of years would warrant at least some consideration for people who are still running that older hardware, especially if it does not cost Intel much to keep that hardware supported.
DH67BL launched in Q1/'11 for LGA1155, the last BIOS got released in 2018-10-23 (I think security fix), and it shows the same notice, so I kindly disagree:
There are plenty of them already. They'll just get more traffic from conscious users, as there won't be an official source anymore. Little cost-saving for Intel, big harm for their users.
Intel is no longer serving BIOS updates for at least one product that was released 16 years ago and
last manufactured 15 years(!) ago. You've had 15 years to make copies of the BIOS files for your needs, and you can still use the original BIOS on your device.
Headline is fully substantiated and I also see that 1151 support (as in boards made just a few years ago) are having their BIOS/UEFI downloads nixed as well. I just tried updating my board with my 7th gen i3. No downloads when I knew one existed before (I refused to get it because everything currently just works.)
