14 DAY TRIAL // AMD may have slammed the market, regardless of how indirectly and unofficially, with what CPUs it will, or perhaps it would be better to say it won't, release next year, but Intel may also have hit a certain snag, that or its motherboard makers have, or both.
Those who haven't read the recent reports concerning AMD's central processing unit lineup may wish to do so now.
After all, it isn't every day that a major chip supplier decides to sack an entire CPU-chipset project.
Granted, the whole issue is still part of rumors and hearsay, but even in absence of official comments, murmurs are bound to start.
Apparently, Intel may also have a certain issue to deal with as far as its next CPUs are involved, though motherboard makers will end up feeling the brunt of it all.
Basically, once the Ivy Bridge collection of next-generation CPUs arrives next year, they might suffer from a visible lack of supporting platform abundance.
This is because all the promises that existing 6-series chipset motherboards will support Ivy Bridge may turn out to be impossible to meet.
Hardware-wise, the products have everything they need to work well in conjunction with one another.
The issue discovered now is inherent in the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) version that Ivy Bridge relies on.
Intel wants to add a variety of elements to the UEFI setup, even as the UEFI specification itself will pass to version 2.3.1 next year.
The requirements of Windows 8 will also have a bearing on the changes, but the fact is that many of the legacy features in today's UEFI will be skipped over entirely.
All in all, the Ivy Bridge is likely to need a clean wipe of the Flash ROM on motherboards, down to flashing both BIOSes on dual-BIOS mainboards.
Though some solutions might still be found, right now it appears that anyone vying for Ivy Bridge chips will need to upgrade to a new mainboard and OS.