Intel to Discontinue P55, H55 and H57 LGA 1156 Chipsets

The days of Intel’s LGA 1156 socket are numbered since the Santa Clara-based chip maker announced recently that at the end of next year it plans to retire three of its most widely spread desktop chipsets that support this platform.

The chipsets in question are the P55 Express, the H55 Express and the H57 Express, the first one of these being launched in September of 2009 while the two other solutions were made official in Q1 of 2010.

Intel announced its decision through a Product Change Notification (PCN) document which revealed that the last orders for these chipsets can be placed on June 29, 2012.

Intel will continue to manufacture the controllers even after that date and the last shipments of P55, H55 and H57 will leave the company’s fabs exactly in a year from now, more precisely on December 7, 2012.

The P55 was the first of Intel’s chipsets to use the PCH (Platform Controller Hub) design, which replaced the traditional Northbridge and Southbridge setup used for past motherboard with a unified chip.

This was possible since, with the introduction of its first LGA 1156 processors, Intel moved some of the logic found in the Northbridge (such as the PCI Express controller) to the CPU itself, making the design of a single chip motherboard controller much simpler.

The H55 Express and H57 Express used this same architecture as the P55, but compared to their older brother these allow consumers to use the integrated graphics found inside select LGA 1156 CPUs.

In related news, Intel released another PCN earlier today that announced its plans to retire five LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge processors launched in the first half of the year, including two second-generation Core parts and three Pentium SKUs.