With Ivy Bridge announcedlets take a look at next year's motherboard chipsets for the Shark Bay platform, as reported by vrzone:

Intel's upcoming LGA-1150 Haswell CPUs will be quite different from the current Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs and Intel will as such have to offer a range of suitable chipsets to go with these changes and so far we've only known the new chipsets as Lynx Point.

As you might already have been able to deduct, Intel is simply moving to the 8-series of chipsets. No big models changes have taken place and as such the desktop platform will get the Z87, H87 and Z85 models for your average consumer, as well as the Q87, Q85 and B85 chipsets for the various corporate and SMB platforms. There's also the C228 chipset for Intel's LGA-1150 based Xeon processors which is the replacement for the C216 chipset.

One thing that is changing compared to the current line-up is that the Z85 chipset will lack support for RAID, something that might not be a great loss, but it's nonetheless a peculiar change. Intel is also updating its Rapid Storage technology in the 8-series chipsets and give the user some basic control over the hard drives/SSDs. Simply put there will be three different settings, power efficiency, maximum performance or a balanced setting. Another new addition is Fast Boot which is a sneaky feature that allows the system to detect the boot drive quicker and as such help improve the overall Boot experience. However, this only works if there's an Intel SSD in the system, which almost sounds like an anti-competitive feature.

We'll be doing some more digging to try and find out some additional details about what else is new with Intel's 8-series chipsets. We're already expecting additional USB 3.0 ports and a full set of SATA 6Gbps ports according to earlier leaks, but we don't know which chipsets will get what features at this point in time.