Three of Gigabyte's Z97 Motherboards Revealed

[josejones]

I hope Intel's SkyLake set-up will finally include all of these features. We have been let down in the desktop area these last few years and it's time for them to change that:

DDR 4
DisplayPort 1.3
HDMI 2.0
PCI-E 4.0
Thunderbolt 40g/ps
DirectX 12
SATA 4 or even 3.2

 

[Someone Somewhere]

DDR4 is of debatable use, there's tons of headroom left in DDR3, and it will cost a lot for the first few years. Let us use existing RAM and leave it to servers for now.

I do agree with with the HDMI2.0, but DP1.3 isn't finalised yet. Unless you want the whole debacle of draft-n repeated?

More PCIe lanes would be preferred; very little aside from GPUs supports PCIe3.0 anyway. Avoiding having to disable PCIe slots because others have been used would be far more useful. PCIe4.0 isn't going to be standardised till late 2015 anyway, so there's not really anything Intel can do.

Please oh please get your units right. 40g/ps evaluates to 40 gram-seconds. Besides that, Thunderbolt is already getting fairly ridiculous speed improvements already. I would tend to stay away from it, though. Too pricey (and monopolised) controllers, plus they'd have to switch to fibre. Which would probably break compatibility.

DirectX 12 is supported by Iris+Iris Pro iGPUs (which will be on Haswell-refresh k-SKU chips, amongst others). The slower ones aren't really worth adding it too, though I suspect they'll get DX12 with Broadwell.

These boards already have SATA Express, if you didn't notice. They (SATA IO) decided that doubling the speed again would take several years and use lots of power (highly paraphrased), so legacy SATA isn't going to get any more speed boosts; it's all PCIe from here.

You seem to have a hunger for tech that doesn't exist...