14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors regarding the cross platform compatibility of Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors have been spreading around the Web for quite some time, and now we can confirm this is indeed the case thanks to an Intel slide which was recently posted online.
As a result, all Sandy Bridge processors should work with the 7-series Panther Point motherboards, which bring native USB 3.0 support and will be released together with the Ivy Bridge CPU series at the beginning of 2012.
The opposite should also be true, but VR-Zone states that older LGA 1155 6-series motherboards could have problems when paired with the upcoming Sandy Bridge processors.
These could be caused by the fact that Intel won't release its cross compatibility guidelines until sometime later this quarter, although the Santa Clara based company is doing its best to speed things up and solve this issue.
A similar thing happened in the Core 2 Duo days when not all LGA 775 boards supported the new processors due to some power-related design issues.
Ivy Bridge is the first processor built by the Santa Clara company that uses the 22nm manufacturing process and is a die shrink of Intel's current Sandy Bridge CPU.
As a result, architectural changes were kept to a minimum, similar to the way Intel made the transition from Nehalem to Westmere at the beginning of 2010, and both chips use the same LGA 1155 package.
Thanks to this resemblance, many rumors have started spreading around the web regarding the cross platform compatibility of the new chips, but, until now, none of those were confirmed.
According to some early reports, Ivy Bridge could be as much as 20% faster than Sandy Bridge, will pack an improved on-die GPU which supports DirectX 11 and up to three independent displays and HDMI 1.4a video output.
