Intel 2012 Official 7 Series Chipset Official Disclosure

Intel's main product, the Sandy Bridge 32nm processor, and its corresponding 6-series chipset motherboard have only just gained a foothold in the market. Next-generation products next year will have come to us. A few days ago, Taiwan's XFastest website exposed screenshots of the official introductory document that allegedly was an Intel 7-series chipset, providing a list of specifications for the six 7-series motherboards.

The 22nm Ivy Bridge processor is expected to be released in early 2012, and still use the LGA 1155 interface, the main corresponding to the Panther Point 7 series chipset. In fact, the 7 series also has a flagship X79 chipset that supports the Sandy Bridge-E processor with the LGA 2011 interface, which is expected to be released by the end of this year and is not part of this discussion.

The six 7-series chipsets are Z77, Z75, H77 and Q77, Q75 and B75. They all support Ivy Bridge 22nm processors and are backwards compatible with Sandy Bridge processors (6-series chipsets with cross-compatibility specifications also support Ivy Bridge). Compared with the 6 series, the biggest upgrade of the 7-series chipset is the arrival of native USB 3.0 support. Four USB 3.0 ports are provided in the chipset.

Among them, the three main chipsets for the retail market can provide 14 USB ports (4x USB 3.0), 6 SATA ports (2x SATA 6Gbps), and integrated audio Codec support dual HDMI/DP audio. The H77 is the lowest-end model with only one PCI-E x16 slot. It does not support overclocking, but it continues the Z68's SRT SSD acceleration technology. The Z75 supports 2x8 dual cards and supports overclocking, but SRT is not supported. The Z77 provides full overclocking functionality. SRT hard drives are accelerated. PCI-E channels can also be divided into 1x16, 2x8, or 1x8+2x4.

For the commercial chipset, the basic specifications are similar, but only the Q77 supports SSD acceleration. The Q75 and B75 also reduce the SATA 6Gbps interface and USB interface.