Intel Socket 2011 to become dominant across high-end product ranges

VR Zone reports Intel's Socket 2011 will become the most widely adopted one across the company's high-end product ranges, from single-socket high-end enthusiast PC chips like the Core i7 3960X and Ivy Bridge follow-ups to all dual processor Xeon E5 workstations and servers now and in 2013, all quad processor and beyond Xeon E7 platforms, from the upcoming Ivy Bridge X to its socket-compatible Haswell EX, and sometime in 2015 or 2016, the 14nm Broadwell EX.

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.