Intel plans to release a few additions to its P55 chipsets. The P55 will launch in Q3 2009 and it will be the first chipset to support Lynnfield quad-cores and Clarkdale dual-core 32nm with a 45nm IGP.

The new chipset leader is P57 and this new one supports both Clarkdale and Lynnfield CPUs. It has one PCIe 16X or two times 8X PCI slots, it also supports Intel Rapid Storage 9.5, Coral Harbor volume cache tuning, email event notify feature and Intel's quiet system technology.

Apart from that, the new chipset has Braidwood support which promises better responsiveness and faster boot time, and this is something that the P55 won't have.

When it comes to storage, you can expect RAID 0/1/5/10 and Intel rapid recover technology. Key input/output features includes 14 USB 2.0 ports, 8 PCI express 2.0 1X ports at 2.5GT/s (depending on the chipset), 6 SATA 3.0GB/s ports and integrated Gigabit Ethernet MAC.

Both P55 and P57 are single chip architecture, but they will need an external LAN chip. H57 and H55 have some additional features while Q57 are the business versions of the chipset meant for business platform support.  

New chipsets including P57, H57, H55 and Q57 will arrive in Q1 2010 along with Clarkdale.