It seems that the LGA2011 family is nearing the end of it’s life, Intel is readying a replacement – LGA2066. The extra 55 pins will be there to support the X-Series “Basin Falls” platform, consisting of Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, and new chipset based on Intel’s 200 series. As is typical for Intel’s HEDT platform (High End Desktop), the processors will be devoid of integrated graphics, but will include cores in their multiples (4,6,8 and 10 to be exact), more PCI-E lanes and higher memory bandwidth.
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Interestingly, ‘Basin Falls’ will come in two flavours. As above, these are Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X.
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Kaby Lake-X will launch as a quadcore only SKU, with a dual channel memory bus. This SKU also has less PCI-E lanes, specifically 16 lanes, so if a Kaby Lake-X CPU is installed in a LGA2066 motherboard, some of the slots may not function – this is the case for both PCI-E slots and RAM slots due to the dual channel architecture. This CPU will come in around 112 Watts, and support up to DDR4-2666.
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The Skylake-X SKUs will come in many more configurations. These will include 6, 8 and 10 core variants, with quad channel memory architecture, and 28 or 44 PCI-E lanes depending on the SKU. These CPUs will come in around 130 Watts.
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Interestingly, the chipset will have a much wider downstream PCIe lane budget than what we’re used to seeing on Intel PCH chips for the past several generations – it offers a whopping 22 PCI-Express Gen 3.0 downstream lanes. This could prove useful in driving bandwidth-hungry onboard devices such as Thunderbolt controllers, multiple PCI-Express SSDs, etc.
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Intel plans to launch the Core i7 “Skylake-X” processors as early as Q3-2017 (July-September 2017).
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