Exclusive! Spy Shots of a Socket 1160 Lynnfield Motherboard

We've already had some hands-on time with Bloomfield, Intel's high-end Nehalem part (officially named Core i7). But we know that not everyone's going to make the jump on board this new platform when it's released later this year. Bloomfield pricing hasn't been announced yet, but we expect it to be in the high-end enthusiast range -- ie. only affordable for price un-conscious buyers.

For mainstream system builders, Intel's solution will be Lynnfield, a socket 1160 CPU that'll have its own motherboard configuration. Lynnfield processors will be incompatible with X58 motherboards sporting socket 1366 -- though Intel assured us that they won't phase out the Bloomfield platform once Lynnfield is released in Q1 of next year (unlike what happened with AMD's socket 940 platform). Another difference: Lynnfield's motherboard will run two-channel DDR 3 memory, as opposed to the highly-touted tri-channel setup in Bloomfield.

We were lucky enough to snap up a few spy shots of an early Lynnfield motherboard, shown below:

 A shiny new Lynnfield wafer. 

Note that this board doesn't have the Independent Loading Mechanism on the socket (the little arm and clicp that holds the CPU down). 

Along with Lynnfield, Intel will also release Havendale, a dual-core CPU using the Core architecture. Havendale will have an integrated graphics chip underneath the heat spreader in a multi-chip package. It's also scheduled to ship in Q1 2009.