14 DAY TRIAL // Haswell-E will be the extreme-performance range of central processing units from Intel, the sort used in high-end workstations and servers, which means that the CPUs need similarly powerful chipsets supporting them. Sure enough, the X99 “Wellsburg” has everything Haswell-E need, and more.
The first thing that will catch people's attention about the Wellsburg is that the chipset supports, or will support, DDR4 memory.
Considering that DDR4 DRAM isn't likely to reach the market in any great capacity before 2015, that's a very good head start.
It also makes motherboards based on X99 very future-proof, as Intel and its partners often like to say about their high-tier platforms, and some not so high-tier.
But we digress. The Intel X99 Wellsburg chipset was supposed to be released in the third quarter of the year, but the newest word from WCCFTech is that the launch will happen in June.
This probably still means that actual availability won't come until Q3, in July-September. Still, the announcement will take place sooner than previously assumed, albeit not by much.
So what are the specs, you might ask? For one thing, the chipset will support four memory channels, as well as overclocking for X-series and K-series central processors.
Also, in addition to CPU overclocking (Ratios and BCLK), GPU overclocking will be part of the spec sheet.
Furthermore, 14 USB ports and 10 SATA ports can be driven by the I/O controller. And here we should mention the existence of both Intel Rapid Storage and RST Smart Response technologies, plus Rapid Recover.
Intel's Integrated Clock is included as well, along with PCI Express 3.0 (obviously) and support for AVX 2.0 (Advanced Vector Extensions). Add to that Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator and you may just have more resources available than you'll be able to use at once.
For those who want to know about the Haswell-E chips that the X99 Wellsburg chipset will be paired with, they have up to 8 cores, TDPs of up to 140W, memory controllers with 2133 MHz per DIMM (so that's the max DDR4 clock, for now), up to 20 MB Intel Smart Cache, and Turbo Boost 2.0 technology (dynamic overclocking).
Presumably, the memory speed will be possible to push beyond that point, since overclockers (and memory makers themselves) do it to DDR3 all the time. Then again, maybe they'll take a couple of years before they brave the waters of DRAM overclocking. Unlikely, but anything can happen.
