14 DAY TRIAL // The Lynx Point chipset, the one that Intel intends to launch in 2013 alongside the Haswell central processing units, is a sort of technological paradox according to the latest leaks.
Info has been pouring forth about a chipset that will follow another chipset that has yet to be launched, but this is only one reason for calling Lynx Point a paradox.
Indeed, it is not unheard of for a company's mid to long-term plans to be exposed prematurely.
What truly makes the Lynx Point qualify as odd is how it will actually be less advanced, in a way, than the one at the hearts of the upcoming 7-Series motherboards.
Indeed, even though the manufacturing technologies and everything else have taken a leap forward, the chipset will have fewer features than Panther Point.
This is owed to how the digital display outputs are going to be communicating straight with the CPU instead of being incorporated in the chipset proper. Out of all the display interfaces, only VGA will continue to be wired through the motherboard.
That said, the Santa Clara, California-based company is not going to neglect the parts of the chipset that do get retained.
According to some leaked roadmap slides, there is full SATA 6.0 Gbps support (SATA III) on all six SATA links.
It was about time too, considering how AMD beat Intel in total SATA III support by about three years.
Moving on, the CPU socket will be different from the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge one, but no name exists for it yet, beyond a speculative LGA 1150 nickname.
Furthermore, Lynx Point supports six USB 3.0 ports in total, two more compared to 7-series, though the so-called I/O port flexibility feature may hint at the possibility of switching between USB 2.0 and 3.0 types.
Finally, the slides reveal a new Rapid Storage driver, quad-read SPI flash memory for the UEFI BIOS and PCI Express 2.0 support (no native 3.0 here either, apparently).
All the above, along with a faster DMI interface, come in a small package size of 22 x 23mm. June, 2013 is the currently scheduled time of arrival.