Intel Lynx Point Chipset Models Detailed

Even though Intel has barely just brought out the Ivy Bridge CPUs line, and not all of them at that, people are already snooping around, trying to find info on the platform that will come next. 

For next year (2013), Intel plans to bring out the series of LGA-1150 central processing units codenamed Haswell. 

They will be just part of the Shark Bay platform, as they will get their own chipsets too. 

As people have, no doubt, guessed by now, said chipsets will have their own codename, Lynx Point (Ivy Bridge is paired with Panther Point). 

VR-Zone has provided what it claims is the relevant, known information on the 8-series chipset models. 

The main difference between them and the current lineup will be that the Z85 chipset will not have RAID support, for some reason. 

Speaking of chipset names, the Santa Clara, California-based company will follow its existing pattern, leading to Z87, H87 and Z85 branding for consumer desktop motherboards and Q87, Q85 and B85 chipsets for corporate / SMB mainboards. 

The C228 chipset is added to these, for Intel LGA-1150 Xeon processors (will replace the C216 chipset). 

One upgrade compared to 7-Series will be a revised Rapid Storage technology (what was initially called SSD Caching). There will be three settings: balanced, power efficiency and maximum performance. 

Some new additions will be made too, like Fast Boot, which lets the system detect the boot drive quicker, provided an SSD is in the system. 

We wrote about the Lynx Point back in February, when some roadmap slides managed to appear on the Internet somehow. 

However, beyond SATA 6.0 Gbps support on all six SATA links and extra USB 3.0 connectors, few specifics were revealed. Then again, Haswell and Lynx Point are still a year away, so we can't say there is much reason to pine for them yet.

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