Mainboards for Intel Haswell Are Ready: Asrock Set to Demo Next Week

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. plans to formally launch its next-generation Core i-series “Haswell” central processing units only in June, but mainboard makers seem to be ready for the new chip well ahead of the official launch. Asrock, one of the world’s largest makers of motherboards, plans to demonstrate its platforms with LGA1150 sockets already next week at CeBIT trade-show.

At the world’s largest IT exhibition, Asrock intends to show off mainboards powered by Intel’s upcoming 8-series chipset, such as Z87 Extreme6, Z87 Pro4-M, H87 Pro4 and B85M. Unfortunately, due to restrictions by the chip designer, the mainboards will only be present statically and will not demonstrate work of code-named Haswell microprocessors. Nonetheless, given that the design of actual motherboards is ready, Asrock may start sales of the platforms as soon as it is allowed to.

Based on the lineup of LGA1150 mainboards that Asrock intends to show at CeBIT, it is clear that the company wants to target performance-enthusiasts, multimedia-interested users as well as business customers with its platforms for Intel Core i-series 4000-family “Haswell” microprocessors.

Other makers of mainboards will likely follow Asrock and demonstrate their Intel 8-series chipsets-based motherboards with LGA1150 sockets at the upcoming trade-show next week.

It is rather noteworthy that Asrock has not announced any kind of demonstration of Intel’s next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) platform for Core i7 Extreme “Ivy Bridge-E” chips in a new LGA2011 packaging. It appears, that the new ultra high-end desktop platform from Intel is still pretty far away.

Intel's fourth-generation Core i-series "Haswell" microprocessors are already in production. The first chips from the new family are projected to be unleashed in June, 2013.

Intel Haswell microprocessors for mainstream desktops and laptops will be structurally similar to existing Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" chips and will continue to have two or four cores with Hyper-Threading technology along with graphics adapter that shares last level cache (LLC) with processing cores and works with memory controller via system agent. On the micro-architectural level the Haswell chip is almost completely different compared to available solutions thanks to significantly improved parallelism as well as numerous new instructions to speed up specific workloads. The processors that belong to the Haswell generation will continue to rely on dual-channel DDR3/DDR3L memory controller with DDR power gating support to trim idle power consumption. The chip will have three PCI Express 3.0 controllers, Intel Turbo Boost technology with further improvements and so on.

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