And Finally, Some Details on the Ivy Bridge Chipset

We know that the first members of Intel's Ivy Bridge CPU collection will be launched in about two weeks, and we also know that the full range won't be out until next year, or late 2012 if the company is really fast. 

As we wait for Intel to make it happen, we are, naturally, going to cover whatever leaks, rumors and product releases come our way. 

ASUS's Maximus V GENE  is just the latest of the many mainboards with the Ivy Bridge chipset. 

Granted, that's not exactly the correct way to put it, since Ivy Bridge is the CPU codename, while Panther Point is the chipset moniker. 

Ivy Bridge CPUs are built on the 22nm manufacturing process technology and would have been already selling if they hadn't been delayed a few months. April 23 is not an official date, but whatever leaks and rumors we spotted seem to be in agreement that it's going to be the big day. We'll see what happens. 

Regardless, AnandTech got to look at some motherboards and published its preliminary findings. 

We'll get the obvious out of the way first: the Z77 chipset natively supports the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface standard. 

Truthfully, it was about time this happened, even though the implementation is rather limited: only two ports are available, which means that third-party controllers are still necessary if motherboards are to have more. 

The other major feature is that all 16 PCI Express lanes are compatible with the PCI Express 3.0 standard. 

For particularly hardcore customers, motherboard makers are even using special chips to increase the number of lanes. 

A third element of the Panther Point is the DDR3L memory support, which reduces the voltage requirements for HTPCs and other low-end machines. 

There is one other curiosity that AnandTech noted, but that's something we already covered here (basically, ASUS invented a new way of reading memory, though details are scarce).

Posted in: Hardware, Preview