Posted on Wednesday, September 07 2011 @ 21:27 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
VR Zone
reports current motherboards may not be compatible with Intel's forthcoming Ivy Bridge processors due to a UEFI related issue. If motherboard makers are unable to fix this problem it will be quite a disappointment as most vendors have gone out and said that their 6-series boards are compatible with Ivy Bridge.
According to our sources, Intel will for example have to do a factory re-work on its own brand motherboards for Ivy Bridge support to be possible, as apparently a clean wipe of the Flash ROM on the motherboard is required to upgrade to the new UEFI version. This is something that apparently can't be done either by the end user or a service location. What we don't know is if this applies to all motherboards, or if this is an issue unique to Intel.
This is bad news for anyone that's been looking at upgrading to Ivy Bridge while keeping their old motherboard, but there's a potential glimmer of hope. On motherboards with a pair of BIOS chips, it should be possible to perform the UEFI upgrade by first flashing the secondary BIOS chip and then the primary one. That said, this would be up to the specific motherboard manufacturer to enable this process for the end users and even in this case, we're not certain if it'll work with all motherboards.
