Intel's 5th Generation of Core series processors have slowly been making their way onto the market in Broadwell-U and Core-M chips, but there has been little information to speak of concerning the desktop-class parts. Of course, it's no secret that the socketed versions of Broadwell CPUs for desktop use will exist one day -- just not yet.
Anyway, what makes it even less of a secret is that Asus announced today that all of its 9-Series motherboards (boards with the Z97 and H97 chipsets) now support the 5th generation Intel Core processors. Of course, you will need to update your BIOS.
The UEFI BIOS updates are available for download from Asus for most of the boards, and on many of them the updates are remarkably easy to install. Asus packs many of its boards with the so-called "Asus USB BIOS Flashback" feature, which allows you to update the BIOS off of a USB stick without even having a CPU or memory installed.
This is especially useful in times like these, because if you are one of the people who ends up buying a Broadwell processor along with a Z97 board, it may be possible that the board comes with an older BIOS that doesn't actually have support for the CPU you've got, and you'll have to turn to a friend to borrow his Haswell chip just so that you can flash your board before you can use it.
Hopefully, we'll be hearing more about the socketed desktop-class Broadwell CPUs over the coming weeks.
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