The guys over at VR-Zone have scored what appears to be a roadmap document that details the changeover from Broadwell and Haswell over to Skylake. In the document, there is a vast amount of information, including the disclosure of the fact that there will be one chipset for consumer and server. This may ultimately mean that consumers will no longer have to suffer with inferior chipsets and enterprise won’t lose certain features that aren’t deemed ‘enterprise’. Not to mention, by having one chipset for both consumer and server, Intel can drive better volumes of that single chip and improve inefficiencies and profitability.

Intel’s Roadmap for Skylake

If you look at the roadmap above you can see that Intel is drastically simplifying their chipsets and CPU offerings, they are offering fewer variants of their CPUs with Skylake and consolidating the 100 series chipset as mentioned above. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t appear to be any mention of high-performance parts, which means that this is likely more of a mainstream chipset roadmap and excludes enthusiast and enterprise since most of the parts mentioned above are BGA like their Haswell and Broadwell predecessors. All of Intel’s truly high performance parts are still LGA-based, which means this clearly isn’t a full roadmap for all of Intel’s products, but even so we get a pretty good idea of what kind of capabilities Intel is aiming for with their newest chipsets and what codenames we’re looking at. That includes Alpine Ridge, which is going to the the latest version of Thunderbolt, delivering 40 Gbps of bandwidth, however it isn’t quite clear if that’ll be accomplished with a single cable or with dual cables like Intel is doing now (even though it looks to be a single cable). It will deliver up to 100W of charging capability, which means that most external hard drives wouldn’t really require a power connector anymore and a Thunderbolt cable should be enough to power the entire device. The same should go for monitors, even those with 4K support, as Thunderbolt claims true dual 4K display support.

Alpine Ridge

Skylake looks to be pretty promising, considering that it’ll be coming in 2015 and will be the first consumer parts to be using DDR4 and PCI-Express 4.0, which hasn’t even been ratified yet as a standard. Skylake will surely resolve any sort of bandwidth issues that might exist virtually anywhere on the system considering the sheer amounts of bandwidth coming from the use of DDR4, PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 3.0.

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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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