http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121106,00.asp
A motherboard that can run both AMD and Intel chips. Sound too good to be true. Well, it kinda is...
To switch to a new processor requires a little shuffling around of components and an additional plug-in board. This board can be thought of as half-motherboard.
The first thing you need to do is to pull out the Pentium 4 chip, then switch the graphics card from one of the PCI Express slots to the other one. Next, the memory needs to be removed and inserted into slots on one of the additional boards so it remains close to the processor and can maintain a high-bandwidth connection.
These boards are plugged into the PCI Express-like socket mentioned above and it's through that connection that they interface with the rest of the motherboard. To complete the switch, a new BIOS chip supporting the new processor should be inserted into the second BIOS chip socket.
So, yeah, it's like buying a segmented motherboard... It'd be much cooler if it could run both processors with different instances of windows, but off the same hard drive at least. Then a sorta built in KVM switch would allow you to switch back and forth between the two. But then again, why? I think it's USELESS.
"Normal users will not want to buy it because it's too complicated," he says. "But it's one solution [for running Intel and AMD systems] and it works."
Ya think?!
ECS is already selling the board and has seen some success in Europe, says Martin Grothe, a product manager with ECS' German subsidiary. He says the product has some appeal to specialist users who enjoy getting their hands dirty and building systems but says its not something for everyone.
The main board costs about $122 and the additional boards cost about $36 each, without the processors, says Grothe.
It's nice to know that if I invented a cool new version of Legos, they'd sell in Europe...