We’ve reported that the cheaper Lynnfield quad-core 45nm Nehalem generation CPUs will finally get official support for DDR3 1333. The Nehalem generation, lead by Core i7 Bloomfield CPUs are limited to DDR3 1066 official support.
Official support doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to reach
DDR3 1333, 1600 or even 2000+ speeds, but as far as Intel is concerned, these
speeds are not officially supported. In the event that they cannot be reached,
Intel doesn’t need to replace your CPU or board.
Surprisingly enough, next generation 32nm six-core Gulftown
CPU will again have support for DDR3 1066 and not even the 1333. Looks like a
step back to us, but we are very sure that Gulftown will find a way to get DDR3
1333, 1600 and 2000+ speeds running on the X58 platform.
Since both Gulftown and Nehalem have a memory controller on
the CPU, it is not the chipset that is to blame. It has to do something more with triple-channel memory, as Lynnfield has dual-channel memory and it runs fine while both Bloomfield and Gulftown have triple-channel memory controllers.