Intel unveiled over Easter time its new Panther Point chipset, aka Intel 7 Series, and dedicated to Ivy Bridge CPU.
An interesting point concerning Thunderbolt, it seems to be wired directly from the chipset and not from the CPU as of today. It should marginally impact performance, but will allow users, such as Apple, to offer maximum PCI-Express lines for the graphic card, and not only 12x instead of the default 16x on MacBook Pro 2011, to be able to reserve 4x for the Thunderbolt. This choice might have been also driven by the fact that Ivy Bridge chipset are based on PCI-Express 3.0, while Thunderbolt is still based on version 2.0.
Beside this point, the Intel 7 series chipset will bring the default support for USB 3.0. Beyond this point, such chipset have less and less functions to manage, being now transferred to the CPU.
