Stefan Mileschin

Fashion bag maker Intel has decided to break backwards compatibility and its forthcoming Broadwell chips will need a new motherboard.

This will be irritating to those who splashed out on the new 22nm Haswell processors which have only been available to buy since June this year.

According to Geek, the focus is already shifting to Intel's next generation of chips and 9-series chipset.

Broadwell will see Intel move to a 14nm manufacturing process with the chips expected to arrive in the second half of next year, but that means that the new 8-series motherboard you buy today will be out-of-date even if it still has the same LGA 1150 chip socket.

The 9-series chipset will incorporate a few compatibility breaking changes. This includes a 1.05V requirement for V_PROC_IO, support for a new type of power supply, and a different chip topology requiring a modified THRMTRIP output buffer.

But it is also possible that Intel will implement a Haswell chip refresh next year that will add support for the 9-series chipset changes. This means that the motherboard you buy this year will be old news.

The message is that if you buy a computer now you have to be ready to keep your PC exactly as it is for two to three years. If that is the case you will not lose any sleep over this news as Broadwell will be standard when you upgrade. But if you want to keep your PC fairly current it is probably better that you wait until next year. Buying Haswell with an eye on upgrading to a Broadwell processor could turn out to be damn pricey.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/intels...mobo-is-needed