Is Intel Making Ivy Bridge Backwards Compatible?

In what has been the most welcome news from Intel’s camp for a while now, they’ve apparently announced that the upcoming generation of 22nm processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, will be backwards compatible with the Socket 1155 motherboards that the current Sandy Bridge processors use. AMD have been doing this with their processors for a while now, where nearly all of their recent CPUs are compatible with the AM3 socket. With Intel now using three sockets, 1366, 1156 and 1155, people were fearing yet another shift when Ivy Bridge comes around. Thankfully, Intel seem to have gotten the message now.

These will still work

The Ivy Bridge processors, while reducing the process size to 22nm, will still have the same chipset size and amount of pins, so they will be compatible with the existing motherboards. Intel will, however, bring out Panther Point chipsets to complement the Ivy Bridge Generation. The good thing is the fact that they’ll be based built around the same socket.

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Ivy Bridge promises a whole host of power-saving and will probably feature DirectX 11 support. Yes, finally. It’s expected to be unveiled at Computex Taipei, and release very early next year.