Embedded World 2015: Skylake-DT Industrial Motherboard Spotted
by Ian Cutress on February 24, 2015 2:44 PM EST
Even with Broadwell not completely out of the door, a lot of attention is being put towards Skylake, the 14nm architecture update from Intel. Current information out the wild seems to contain a lot of hearsay and supposed leaks, but now we actually have at least some indication that Skylake is coming thanks to ComputerBase.de who spotted an ASRock industrial motherboard with the LGA1151 socket for Skylake processors at Embedded World.
Given how far Skylake is away from market, chances are that this motherboard is a mock-up rather than a working unit as we would imagine Intel to still be working on the first round or two of CPU steppings at this point. The motherboard does show up some interesting differences to Haswell, such as the socket which moves the notches higher up to the corners:
One of the big talking points of Skylake is the DDR4 compatibility, but this board throws a spanner into that by supporting two DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM slots for up to 16GB of memory. It is also worth noting the separate chipset (most likely a server grade C236 for the next Xeon E3 CPUs) and support for three HDMI ports on the board.
ComputerBase.de also photographed a roadmap showing the boards on offer along with chipsets and some specifications:
Here we see C236 for workstations, Q170/H110 for Desktop (presumably mirroring Q and H chipsets like we have now), QM170 for mobile and at the end is the Atom SoCs. The specifications show desktop CPUs at 35, 65 and 95W, with the 95W being slightly up from Haswell. Mobile CPUs fall in at 15-45W, while the Atom details are thin on the ground. All the boards with memory listed have DDR3L as the main memory type, and in most cases the boards have Q3/Q4 2015 sampling availability with Q1 2016 as the mass production date.
Can we take much information away from this? Aside from TDP numbers and chipset naming, the remarking thing is the DDR3L support, especially with the expectation that Skylake will be DDR4. One thing is for certain is that the motherboard companies are definitely in a situation where designing and building boards for Skylake is on the agenda. It makes me wonder if Embedded World has any more similar motherboards to be seen, and how many we will see at Computex in June.
Source: ComputerBase.de
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Flash13 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Intel has played people who use desktops, as fools!..Strange because desktop users are the one who got them where they are! Yes, I have a very long memory.extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
How exactly? Geez.XZerg - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
It wasn't really the desktop users that got them there. it was the mobile users and the Pentium M that got them where Intel is. On desktop Pentium 3 and 4 were clobbered by AMD's K7/K8 offering for most part of P3/4 cycles. It was really the Pentium M which is the mobile version of refined P3 that brought a lot of attention to Intel for the battery life and performance it offered. That evolved into Core Duo and then Core 2 Duo which pretty much put the first set of nails into AMD's coffin. AMD isn't dead but isn't anywhere near its glory days of 2003ish in the hey days of K7 and early K8. NOTE late days of K8 were eclipsed by Core 2 Duo's performance.Flunk - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
That only makes sense if your memory only extends back to the Pentium 4 (7th-gen x86) era. Intel became a powerhouse based on the success of their early 8086 and 8088 processors. It's been onward and upward since then, but it's all based on that initial success.zodiacfml - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
I could not have said it any better. I still remember those articles overclocking the M to performance almost similar to AMDs chips or better performance per watt.mfenn - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
I'm willing to bet that they are leveraging the flexible memory controller technology that they developed in Haswell-EP to provide both DDR3 and DDR4 support. It makes sense for the cost-sensitive embedded market to have a DDR3 option for the time being.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
There's no Z-series chipset listed. That's the one that will support DDR4, if any of them are to.techmar - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
The memory controller is integrated on processor itseft. So memory support should not be limited by chipset used.Flunk - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Hahaha, that's rich.Seeing as Intel has previously limited overclocking, PCI-E lane allocation and eGPU support based on chipset there really is no reason to believe they won't lock CPU features based on chipset again.
Antronman - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link
Want more than 4GBs of RAM?We're sorry, you need to be using our X99 platform for this much memory.