14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent earnings call conference, Intel's chief executive officer, Paul Otellini stated that everything is on track with the company's upcoming high-performance Romley platform that includes the Sandy Bridge-EP CPUs and the Patsburg chipset.
This statement comes after various reports have suggested that Intel is having troubles with the consumer version of this platform which pairs together the X79 PCH with six-core Sandy Bridge-E processors.
“There's really no change for the schedule for Romley, which for those of you who don't follow our code names, is the Sandy Bridge version of the server products. We're public in saying that we'll be in production this year, nothing's changed. We still expect to be in volume production this year,” said Intel's CEO Paul Otellini.
“We have not gone public on the launch date because our server customers are very conservative about putting the dates out.
“I don't expect to stall out given the timing that we've built into the product. I would add that as you've seen the product, it looks very exciting . The performance is really quite good,” concluded Mr. Otellini.
Intel's Sandy Bridge-EP processors will be released as Xeon E5 parts and these will be split in three different series, dubbed E5-1600, E5-2600 and E5-4600, depending on the number of sockets they support.
The chips are expected to include up to eight processing cores and 20MB of L3 cache, but they also carry 40 PCIe Gen3 lanes, 4 DMI 2.0 lanes, and an integrated quad-channel DDR3 memory controller.
Sandy Bridge-EP CPUs will be paired together with the Patsburg chipset, that will be available in four different flavors, to form the Romley platform.
Intel's CEO hasn't provided any information regarding the company's Sandy Bridge-E processors or the X79 chipset. Both of these were initially expected to launch in Q4 of this year, but have allegedly been postponed to January 2012.