Our friends over at VR-Zone have revealed some very interesting details about the upcoming Intel Haswell refresh and Intel Broadwell platforms. The report shows that the new processors coming out of these platforms would only be compatible with new revised 9-series chipset motherboards.
Intel’s Haswell refresh platform is expected to arrive in Q2 of 2014. This new platform and the current Haswell platform would be compatible with the current 8-series and upcoming 9-series chipset motherboards wit the LGA1150 socket. We originally though Intel’s Broadwell platform was going to be mobile only, but it has been revealed that there will be a desktop components that will release in the second half of 2014.
Intel’s Broadwell platform would only be compatible with the 9-Series (Z87 and H97) chipset motherboards. This is odd to us as the Broadwell chip is nothing more than a 14nm die shrink of a 22nm Haswell processor and it is still based on the same LGA1150 socket. One reasoning behind this could be new power supply ratings implemented by Intel for the Broadwell processors. The report notes that a number of electrical connections between the CPU socket and chipset are different, and the chip follows a different power supply (as in power distribution within the chip/motherboard) than Haswell. These differences could cause backwards-compatibility issues, meaning you couldn’t use a Broadwell chip on an 8-series motherboard even though the have the same LGA1150 socket.
The 9-series chipset will be with the SATA Express, which may become a major role with Intel’s SSD overclocking. The report also talks about the memory bus of the 9-series chipset. One slide shows DDR3, while the other shows DDR4. If Intel decides to go the DDR4 route AMD will have a lot of catching up to do as they are only expected to move to DDR4 in 2015 with the launch of their excavator powered Carrizo APU.
Source: VR-Zone | News Archive
