Just a day ago Intel released its latest high-end Broadwell-E processors. The chips offer the newest 14 nm production process, improved performance, lower power consumption and most importantly an easy upgrade path – all Broadwell-E processors run in the existing Intel X99 infrastructure with only a motherboard BIOS update needed in certain cases.
Unfortunately this easy upgrade path story will end very soon – visitors of the on-going Computex 2016 exhibition have spotted a new prototype motherboard for the future Skylake-E processors. It turns out that these processors will have a new socket with no fewer than 3647 contact pins so expect huge processors, huge cooling solutions and huge sockets. As a comparison all enthusiast-class Intel processors use the LGA 2011 socket with obviously 2011 contact pins inside.
One of the reasons for this huge increase of the contact pin number is that Skylake-E will come with six-channeled memory so a large number of these pins will serve the processor’s integrated memory controller. The first Skylake-E processors are expected sometime in year 2017.
Source: Wccftech.com