Today marks the official introduction of Intel’s 9 Series chipset. Motherboards based on the chip have been selling for weeks, and we’ve even reviewed one of ’em, but the press embargo for the chipset didn’t lift until just now. Go figure. This chipset launch is unusual in another way, too. As far as I can tell, it’s the first time Intel has introduced a new core-logic platform without an updated CPU alongside it. The recent Haswell Refresh is little more than a speed bump for last year’s silicon, so it doesn’t count.
Last year at around this time, Intel was releasing its brand-new Haswell CPU architecture and its 8-series chipsets out into the world for back-to-school season. About a year before that, it was doing the same for its Ivy Bridge architecture and 7-series chipsets. This year, we’re getting more new chipsets, but they aren’t coming with a new CPU architecture—just some mildly refreshed Haswell processors, some of which we’ve covered already. We’ll get to the new chipsets in a moment, but first let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Intel’s near-silence on the next-generation Broadwell CPUs. We’ve had a few snippets of information about the company’s next CPU architecture, but since announcing a delay late last year the company has said little on the issue. Mass production was supposed to ramp up in the first quarter of 2014, and that quarter has come and gone.