Intel ‘Cannonlake’ architecture processors were supposed to be the successor of the upcoming ‘Sky Lake’ processors with LGA 1151 package, but things seem to have changed. Intel will be introducing ‘Kaby Lake’ in its place and it’s scheduled for 2016 launch.
One of the key highlights of Haswell was that it used a Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator (FIVR) which helped to simply voltage supply on the motherboard and hence making motherboard manufacturing process easier. However the upcoming Skylake and Kaby Lake will not be integrated with FIVR. Sources said that it was due to the thermal design power of these packages which was too high. It was also bragged for overclocking as well since it simplified the process of having Vcore, VGPU, VCCSA, VCCIO and PLL into a single and simple design. What it means is that motherboard manufacturers will need to make more efforts in preparing voltage supply in their motherboards.
Intel 14nm Sky Lake SKUs launch will also be accompanied by newer desktop chipsets labelled under Intel 100 series. These will have more than 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes, up to six SATA III ports, USB 3.0 and 2.0 native support. Kaby Lake is said to implement native USB 3.1 support and will be compatible with LGA 1151 socket motherboards.
FIVR may make a comeback with ‘Ice Lake’, but it’s way too early to say.
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