Exclusive Intel's first LGA 2011 motherboards unveiled

Today we can as the first publication in the world unveil the codenames of Intels first two own brand LGA 2011 motherboards which are expected to launch in the second half of this year with support for Intels upcoming high-end consumer desktop platform.

Sadly we dont actually have a lot of details beyond the Intel code names for the two boards at this moment, but well be following up with more platform details as we get them. Intels first two models are currently known as "Siler" and "Thorsby" and as you can see from the roadmap slide below, both models are expected sometime in the second half of this year.

The roadmap is about two months old by now, but the information should be correct. As this is the platform that will replace the current LGA 1366 motherboards and Nehalem based processors, it will initially be exclusive for Intels Extreme Edition CPUs. This is likely to disappoint a lot of consumers that so far have been hoping for an upgrade solution for their LGA 1366 systems, but it seems like that is less likely now, unless you have US$999 (or more) to blow on a CPU.

What we do know is that the new boards will use quad channel memory and were expecting one DIMM per channel on most if not all consumer motherboards. The CPUs for the LGA 2011 platform that targets consumers are currently known as Sandy Bridge-E, a CPU which will also appear as high-end Xeon processors. This will be Intels first PCI Express 3.0 platform as well, but dont expect to see boards with more than two full x16 PCI Express slots, just like the current LGA 1366 boards, although it would be possible to do boards with up to five slots with eight lanes worth of PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth per slot.

Wed expect to see the first boards from Intels partners on display at Computex 2011 which starts on the 31st of May this year. However, the platform isnt really expected to launch until a few months later, maybe during IDF San Francisco in September. Some of this will most likely depend on how well AMDs upcoming Bulldozer platform performs in comparison to Intels current LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge platform and if AMD performs better than Intel is expecting, we might see the Sandy Bridge-E platform pulled forward.