What did you work on then? Most of damaged devices I saw, be it laptops, motherboards, graphics cards or consoles, were damaged due to burned power delivery. Burnt VRMs on GPUs are close to being a meme among repair technicians at this point.
Do you trust the motherboard manufacturers to design high-quality, robust local regulation or just throw together whatever with the cheapest parts they can get?
Multi-stage regulation has many merits and single rail systems will become more mainstream, but don't get hyped - they have as many disadvantages as they have advantages.
Just the systems I've built. I've never seen a motherboard VRM fail outside of some of the first ones in the 00s that had bad electrolytic caps and even with the bad caps the systems kept working in both cases. I can't recall a graphics card I've owned or put into service ever failing due to the VRM, EVGA had that thing awhile back but that was bad design. Even when I helped out and fixed a friends HP or Dell it was almost always the PSU or HD that failed.
Hardly anything
Basically what it is, is that Intel is trying to change standards because they are getting their asses handed to them by Advanced Micro Devices
Lol, no AMD dosn't give a shit what form factor the PSU uses, it dosn't affect them at all.
Seasonic already kind of does this with their better PSUs. Everything is 12v, then an add-on board inside the PSU just steps it down to 5v and 3.3v. ATX might be an old spec, but the technology driving it can actually be quite modern and the non-negative voltages are used often enough to keep them around, but there are reasons for it. For example, negative voltages are a lot easier to obtain from an AC source as opposed to a DC source. There are a number of trade-offs to going with a more simple PSU compared to a more complicated one. I'd only use something like a plain +12v supply for a very small and compact PC, otherwise it makes no sense.
Most modern high-end designs are going to do this and the mere fact that they are is basically saying a sole 12v rail in the PSU is the right way to go. Modern ATX PSU use modern technology but from a design perspective they are obsolete.
No, it really isn't. We have PSUs that do over 90% conversion efficiency which I challenge any motherboard maker to do.
As for needlessly complex, no, just no. Not for any non-simple SOC-based PC. Every voltage provided is used and even now some other ones made by the board. It's not needlessly complex.
Yeah, it is.
Sure we have 90+ % efficient ATX PSUs but 95% of that efficiency is derived from the 12v rail. In terms of actually delivering any meaning amounts of power the 5v 7.5v and 3.3v rails are a joke and is meaningless in terms of the efficiency of the PSU and system. Their (5v. 3.3v rails) existence is un-needed complexity, nothing runs directly off of 3.3 or 5v volts and its not hard to step down 12v to whatever you need like it was in 90s and early 00s when the ATX spec made sense.
To the extent that boards are even using those minor rails boards are already converting 5v and 3.3v to smaller voltages already so just start with 12v and be done with it. Besides whats really using them? CPU and GPU are 12v, even RAM is 12 now isn't it? That leaves random controllers and sensors?
And I'd rather have that step-down happening in the PSU which has a nice fan creating plenty of airflow over the components. DC to DC conversion on the motherboard in a VRM can sit in stagnant air and get stupid hot.
Its already getting stepped down, nothing runs directly off of 5 or 3.3v, the motherboard is already doing it, why do it twice? Also it dosn't need any air flow, these voltages don't supply any meaningful power, nothing is getting hot aside from 12v.
