First Intel Sandy Bridge Xeon Processors Said to Arrive February 20

This February, Intel plans to release a large number of mid-class processors including 11 Sandy Bridge-based models from the Xeon E3 CPU line, recent leaks suggesting these are expected to hit retail on February 20, together with no less than three server motherboard chipsets.

As we have previously reported a while back, these new Xeon processors will be introduced in the E3-1200 product family and all, but one, are based on the quad-core version of the Sandy Bridge architecture.

All of them incorporate 8MB of L3 cache (minus the E3-1225 and the E3-1220L) and support Intel's Turbo Boost technology that increases the operating frequency of the processors according to the application load.

In addition, with the exception of the entry-level E3-1220 and E3-1225, all the new processors pack Hyper-Threading support.

According to the information provided by the CPU-World website, operating frequencies vary between 3.1GHz and 3.5GHz while the TDP is rated at either 80W or 95W.

Only two models don't respect these rules, the dual-core Xeon E3-1220L which features only two cores and consumes just 20W of power and the quad-core Xeon E3-1260L that has a TDP of 45W.

As the L at the end of their name implies, these are both low-power parts and carry reduced clock speeds, the E3-1220L also packing a limited amount of L3 cache memory (3MB).

Based on marketing slides published by Intel and cited by CPU-World, the Xeon E3-1280 CPU offers up to 20% better performance than Xeon X3480, in integer applications, up to 21% better performance in floating-point apps, and it's up to 30% faster in server-side Java tasks.

As noted earlier, Intel was aiming at a February 20 launch for the new E3-1200 series, but this date could be delayed due to the SATA problems encountered by Intel with its Cougar Point chipsets.