Intel Lynx Point motherboards support 14nm Broadwell CPUs

Feb 14, 2012 02:01 GMT  ·  By

Intel’s LGA 1150 socket that will be introduced together with next year’s Haswell processors will also be compatible with the company’s upcoming Broadwell CPUs, which are expected to arrive in 2012 fabricated using the 14nm production node.

This information was unveiled by a recently leaked Intel slide that details the company’s 2013 Haswell processors and the Lynx Point chipset accompanying it.

According to this slide, the LGA 1150 socket that Intel plans to introduce at the same time with the successor of Ivy Bridge will also be compatible with the company’s 2014 desktop CPUs.

Even though most of us expected this to be the case, it’s nice to see a confirmation from Intel’s part.

The slide leaked by Donanim Haber also gives us some info about Intel’s Lynx Point chipset, which pretty much packs the same features as the 7-series platform controller hubs (PCHs) for Ivy Bridge CPUs, but adds a Clarkville NIC.

For those of you that aren’t up to speed with Intel’s processor plans, the Broadwell CPU comes as a "tick" on the chip maker’s roadmap, meaning that this is actually a 14nm die shrink of the Haswell architecture.

Compared to its predecessor, Broadwell will however use a more integrated design which includes features such as Ethernet, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 right on the chip’s die.

Right now, little else is known about Broadwell, but since it comes as a die shrink of Haswell, many of the architecture changes and features introduced by Intel in the latter will make their transition towards this 2014 CPU.

Some of the most important changes will target the processor’s IPC performance, but a series of new instruction sets like AVX2 and TSX are also expected to make their appearance.

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