Probably the most humorous motherboard of them all was Intel’s own Bad Axe motherboard. Intel shipped out different revisions of the same motherboard with Pentium 4 EE955, Pentium EE965, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad – and every time, a new CPU would not work in older rev motherboard, even though power consumption was cut dramatically.

This is LGA-1156A, third Socket for i5 and the one that will be the standard... until LGA-1156B and LGA-1156C arrive.

Enter LGA-1156. According to friends at Fudzilla, next 18 months will see the debut of LGA-1156 for Core i5, LGA-1156B supporting integrated graphics and LGA-1156C. If we take into account that the company previously planned to manufacture this socket as LGA-1160 and LGA-1158, we should really take a good look at mighty Chipzilla.
If Nvidia is swaying the market with “smart” rebrands of their old products, how should we comment Socket policy at Intel? Perhaps a new spin on infamous Australian ad for chips – “Same sh*t, but won’t work package”?

If IT industry needs one thing, it would be to wake the heck up and start making products that won’t confuse the consumer. Is it that hard to estimate what envelopes your products need to work within Tic-Toc model and make a single socket that would, by some crazy imagination, work with every CPU that comes out for it?

In the end, it will truly end up with AMD being right about Socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3, while Intel’s single socket policy failed miserably on both Socket 775 and LGA-1156. And that is sad, given the size of chip giant from Santa Clara.

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As company description explains, this company has extremely long lead-times, needed for implementation into designs of computers from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer and many others. If we take into account that the mainstream Nehalem platform (Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors, probably branded as Core i3 & i5) is set to debut this summer, it’s no wonder that i5 design appeared on AVC’s website five months before introduction.

This cooler fits almost all sockets on the market - including the upcoming LGA-1156 ;)

The company now lists several products compatible with LGA-1156 socket, from OEM solutions (competing for the boxed cooler contract) to a retail multi-heatpiped beast called Napoleon (Plus). In order to win the OEM contracts for enthusiast-class machines, Napoleon (Plus) fits inside the Intel Socket Load Limit policies – e.g. weighs in exactly 450g. A lot of enthusiast coolers weigh more than double that, and while it may be ok to keep a 1000 gram cooler mounted vertically on a horizontally mounted motherboard (e.g. testbed configuration), it is definitely not ok to keep such a monster in a chassis. Napoleon (Plus) has no such issues and can be mounted on any LGA-1156 motherboard without additional strengthening.

For the end of this post, we can probably state that most or even all LGA-1366-compatible coolers can support LGA-1156 processors as well.

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Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1’2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3’2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.

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