Intel Skylake gets support for USB 3.0 as a chip interconnect

Details on the complete line of chipset for Intel’s upcoming Skylake platform have come online. Motherboards for the Broadwell successor will receive support for, among other things, Super Speed ​​USB Inter-Chip, which makes USB 3.0 the basis for chip-to-chip interconnects.

The Intel slides that VR-Zone managed to get their hands on show that Intel wants to switch completely to the 100 Series chipsets for desktop processors in 2015. For example, the Z97 and the H97 are already being followed by the Z170 and the H170 and the H110 has to serve the budget segment, although the latter will come in the third instead of the second quarter.

The Z170 and H170 of the Series 100 chipsets for successively the high-end and the mainstream market will have support for 10 and 8 USB 3.0 ports respectively. For all chipsets, two of the USB 3.0 ports can be assigned as ssic.

This interconnect significantly reduces consumption and increases throughput in chip-to-chip communication compared to standards such as gpio, mipi and hsic. Ssic was developed by the USB-IF Alliance in collaboration with the organization that enforces standards for the mobile industry, the MIPI Alliance.

Skylake processors, like Broadwell, are produced at 14nm but have a completely new architecture, where Broadwell can be regarded as a variant of Haswell on a smaller production process. Skylake processors are combined with an LGA 1151 socket and receive support for ddr4, among other things.