The Z590, B560, and H510 aim to support the future 11th generation Intel Core CPUs while maintaining backward compatibility. The chipsets for Intel’s future 500-series motherboards are imminent, or to be more precise, they will be announced on January 11, 2021.
Basically, the lifespan of their chipsets is very limited in the sense that it’s common for new CPU generations to have some change that invalidates compatibility with previous chipsets, even if they use the same socket.
Therefore, with the news of the imminent arrival of the 500 series chipsets, which according to the latest information from China will take place on January 11 next year, many will surely wonder if these will be the only chipsets compatible with the 11th generation Intel Core CPUs. Fortunately, the current 400 series boards will also be compatible, so we don’t have to worry about that.
In any case, just like AMD, it’s normal for each new generation to come with a chipset that uses all of its features and doesn’t require BIOS updates to be compatible. For example, the 500-series boards will support PCI Express 4.0, a feature that is not present in the 10th generation and that not all current Z490 boards support, for example.
Of course, the 500-series chipsets will also be compatible with the current 10th generation.
It seems that the launch will not take place at your CES event on January 12 and the boards will arrive a day earlier.
One of the biggest questions about these boards is whether RAM speeds will be unlocked on chipsets below Z590, a limitation that currently puts their CPUs at a significant disadvantage against AMD. You can read more about that here.
Unfortunately, the launch of the 500-series motherboards will not coincide with the arrival of their leading CPUs, the 11th generation, which calls itself “Rocket Lake-S”. These will be their last 14nm CPUs, specifically with Ice Lake 10nm cores ported to 14, and there are high expectations for performance and IPC as Intel needs to provide a strong answer to AMD Ryzen 5000.
The 500 series boards will not support the next generation, the 12th, but in this case, it is more than justified considering that the future Alder Lake CPUs will bring new features like DDR5 that will make it impossible to keep the previous chipsets. The same will happen with AMD and the foreseeable introduction of the AM5 socket.