Obviously, even with the same socket and pin number, the pinouts would differ - in the EX series, there will be more QPI links, at least three, and the memory interface will be to the external dual-channel buffers rather than directly to the DIMMs. Since the Haswell EX and beyond are confirmed to support DDR4 memory, don't be surprised to see some sort of unofficial DDR4 support even in their predecessor, the Ivy Bridge EX, less than a year from now - at least for 'validation' purposes. Of course, that would require clocking the memory controller much higher, up from 1600 to 2666MHz JEDEC standard speed level, but then, Intel has just enabled that memory controller speed in the Ivy Bridge EX anyway for the lockstep mode functionality. Therefore, if keeping the same speed, but using the future external DDR4 memory buffer, you possibly could 'test' DDR4-2666 memory enablement on that CPU too.
Intel Socket 2011 to become dominant across high-end product ranges
Posted on Monday, July 16 2012 @ 17:02 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck