Intel made a bit of a surprise announcement on Tuesday, January 22nd. They have announced they will be slowly discontinue production of desktop motherboards over the next 3-years when they will be out of the market completely. Intel says they are going to focus instead on on other aspects of the PC industry, such as reference designs for Ultrabooks and all-in-ones, along with its Next Unit of Computing (NUC).

While this is great news for other desktop PC motherboard manufacturers such as MSI and Asus, is this a sign that the traditional desktop PC is going the way of the VCR? The tablet market has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year as has that for laptops and Ultrabooks.  This is great for the consumer market as more people ditch the traditional desktop for devices which are smaller and more portable.

But, what about the corporate and enterprise markets? Dell is a major supplier for desktop computers to medium and large businesses. Looking at their website, it appears they currently only offer Intel based machines. HP on the other hand offers some (about 1/4 of their total desktop PCs) AMD (which would use MSI or ASUS motherboards) processor desktop PCs. Let’s not forget about Apple’s Mac Pro (not Mac Book), that also uses an Intel chipset. I still can not see businesses moving away from the traditional desktop computer.

via Tom’s Hardware