According to the MyDrivers portal, Intel has notified its manufacturing partners that they will stop manufacturing their last generation chipsets. The Z690 and B660 motherboards debuted to receive the 12th generation Intel Core Alder Lake, which introduced support for RAM memory in DDR5 format, and PCie Gen 5, to offer more hardware-based performance for the future.
For now, it is just a rumor. Intel's own product notification website does not report any changes for these products. But on MyDrivers' side, they cite their sources as saying that Intel has just notified motherboard makers that it will be replacing the Z690 and B660 chipsets with next-generation chipsets. Some of them have just come on the market.
Goodbye motherboards that launched with Alder Lake
This marks one year since the launch of the latest generation of 600-series chipsets. The Z690 platform appeared in October 2021, and the B660 launched in January of last year. With the introduction of the 13th generation Core non-K series, Intel also released its new mid-range B760 chipset.
The differences between the 600 and 700 series are mostly cosmetic, focusing primarily on PCIe lanes and USB support. On its Z790 chipset, Intel increased the number of available Gen20 lanes to 4, at the cost of reducing Gen16 lanes from 8 to 3. For the vast majority of users, this will not make much of a difference, since in the case of using Gen3 devices, the gen4 lanes can offer the same performance that the hardware demands.
Intel has no plans to retire its base H610 chipset yet, making it the only one to remain from that series of platforms launched alongside Alder Lake. Possibly it is because will still need a basic option for users who want CPus Alder Lake, such as non-specialized offices or educational centers. As always, these are rumors, and there is no official confirmation, especially when new motherboard models have been released by some manufacturing partners.
Source: Videocardz
