Intel P67 Express Chipset Begins Product Discontinuance Cycle
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
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25 comments
On April 2nd, Intel quietly announced its P67 Express chipset has been discontinued just ahead of Ivy Bridge's release.
With the market demand going more towards Z68 motherboards and now with the release of the new Intel 7 Series Z77 (coming soon: Z75, H77 and B75) chipsets, Intel has announced the product discontinuance of the P67 chipset. The P67 will not necessarily go quietly into the night, though. The chipset that has powered the current generation Sandy Bridge processors since the start, will be compatible with Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors through an appropriate UEFI update. The chipset will be available through April 5, 2013.
Forecasted Key Milestones:
- Product Discontinuance Program Support Began: Apr 02, 2012
- Product Discontinuance Demand to Local Intel Representative: Jul 06, 2012
- Finalize Discontinuance Assurance: Aug 10, 2012
- Last Corporate Assurance Product Critical Date: Oct 18, 2012
- Last Product Order Date: Oct 26, 2012
- Orders are Non-Cancelable and Non-Returnable After: Oct 26, 2012
- Last Shipment Date: Apr 05, 2013
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Tell me... how do you expect to drive a processor with memory controler, pci-e, voltage regulators and all that stuff integrated on chip with an old P45 motherboard? Do you want FSB back? DO YOU?
Ivy will be backward compatible with Sandy motherboards with a simple BIOS update, if your motherboard maker is kind enough to support it.
It's nothing unusual, if you need to upgrade your bios on older motherboards with pci-e 1.1 or 2.0 to support 2.1 graphics cards... so why is making an update on arhitecture any worse?
Unlike AMD, Intel makes drastic changes to their CPU's every year to warrant a new socket and chipset.
It's like a 1.44 MB USB stick.
That was my point.
Unlike AMD, Intel also makes changes to their CPU architecture that actually ADD to performance. If that is the trade-off with breaking compatibility, so be it.
Unlike AMD, Intel also makes changes to their CPU architecture that actually ADD to performance. If that is the trade-off with breaking compatibility, so be it.
Except we already know that that's essentially BS. Remember ASRock's P67 Transformer?
That was a motherboard that, while based on the P67 chipset, powered the first-generation Core i3 processors (LGA 1156, native to the 5-series chipset).
So we can see that there weren't "drastic changes" made. In fact, there was a certain decision made (where the clock generator was located) to intentionally break compatibility- something that could (and probably should) have continued on.
On the flip side, compatibility can't be thrown out completely. Why is PCI-E so successful? Because PCI-E 2.0 is compatible with 1.0 or 3.0. If every version was completely different, the market adoption would've been much slower.
Unless if you're the only one who's making the stuff that uses it (CPU and CPU socket). However, I would find it unreasonable if Intel got extremely greedy and tied each small groups of or individual processors to a specific chipset or sockets, even if they had the same steppings.
A 1.44 MB USB stick the size of a small plate. (FTFY)