It’s no surprise but it has been confirmed in Intel documents published by Heise.de, the next Intel Panther Point chipset will support USB 3.0 natively. Of the fourteen USB ports supported, four can be USB 3.0 as long as there are ad-hoc drivers.
Intel has announced support for Windows 7 and Windows 8, with the ports functioning at USB 2.0 in Windows XP & Vista with the native EHCI driver. A generic Linux XHCHI driver should give USB 3.0 support.
Panther Point is scheduled for the beginning of 2012, at the same time as the forthcoming Ivy Bridge processors, the 22nm version of the current 32nm Sandy Bridges. These CPUs should use Socket LGA 1155 but there’s nothing to say they won’t be compatible with current motherboards.
