Posted on Monday, August 09 2010 @ 0:02 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
spotted some leaked photos of Intel's Sandy Bridge socket, these shots were published over at the XtremeSystems forum by JCornell. The new socket for Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge chips will have 2011 pins, which reflects the addition of quad channel memory support, integrated graphics, and the integration of the PCI Express bus.
First of all, these sockets are almost perfectly square which indicates a larger socket due to the increase from 1366 to 2011 pins. In addition to that, the socket now requires not one, but two retention latches to hold down the processor. This is a relatively unheard of thing simply because both AMD and Intel have both sufficed in the past with just one retention latch. The added latches and pins may cause issues for motherboard manufacturers in the future considering the fact that the likelihood of an inexperienced customer forgetting to use both latches or having a larger socket to possibly damage.
