I've read somewhere that the issue could be resolved by placing a heatspreader on the SSD, sandwiched between the NIC and SSD. Early prototype/sample hiccups I guess.
Intel's NUC uses a 17W TDP CPU which is equivalent to Ultrabooks. If there are future models, its probably coming from a mobile CPU, lower overall power consumption. For its intended market and purpose, I think the performance is sufficient.
You know, I think the slot idea is actually really good going forward. Circuit boards cost more the more layers you have on them. You need more layers to support higher pin counts and dense component layouts. However, the motherboards of the near future will actually have very few parts on them since so many things are being integrated onto the CPU. The only need for a high pin count now is memory. With point-to-point memory in the future needed to bring lower latency, the pin count needed by memory will be even higher. Everything else on the motherboard put together requires relatively few pins nowadays. With so many things integrated onto the cpu, you don't need many expansion slots so you don't need many traces for pcie. It makes sense to make a small, expensive pcb with a high layer count that has the cpu and ram on it. The motherboard itself can be a bigger pcb with fewer layers that has power components, expansion slots, and etc on it. There's probably no need for a MB bigger than micro-atx in the future either.
There were. I had socketed versions of an 8088 and a 286. Enthusiast stuff tended to be socketed and OEM stuff soldered on. Honestly, the cost of a socket isn't that high and I don't think it's very high now either. The real reason this is happening is to save space. The large majority of desktops in the future are going to have the iMac for factor or a tower about the size of a nintendo wii.Surely it must have been a matter of purchasers preference (OEM and resellers). I say that because my 8088 (5MB HDD lol), 286 and 386 were all soldered CPU's with zero upgrade options for the mobo in terms of CPU.
I distinctly remember how cool it was that my 486 sported a CPU socket that I could upgrade the cpu (and I did, twice!).
But I have no doubts that before the 486 platform there were CPU socketed mobos for 286's and so on, as you appear to have experienced.
PCI-e? Audio? NIC? Video outputs? USBs? PCI-e may be the only one that takes many pins on its own, but it still all adds up. It's not just memory.
A socket doesn't change that much for the form factor. The socket needs balls/pins, and the CPU needs pins/lands. BGA makes it simpler (probably a good bit cheaper): solder balls to the PCB. The space savings of not having a socket are minimal, even in the context of uber-small Mac Mini-like machines, and tablets. The thing is, most users, I'll bet well over 99%, never change out their CPU. So, while we lose flexibility, Intel justifies it to big OEMs and shareholders with relative ease (my concern is more Intel's classic behavior of pretending no niches in the PC market overlap, resulting in strangely-high price deltas for what should be minor feature upgrades).
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