Intel Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are getting ready for release

Oct 19, 2011 20:11 GMT  ·  By

With a little less than a month to go until Intel will make official its first processors based on the high-performance Sandy Bridge-E architecture, European retailers have started listing some of these chips on their websites, the Core i7-3930K and Core i7-3960X being the first to arrive.

These two Intel processors have popped up in Sweden on the PriceSpy website, and the former is available for pre-order with a 5099 SEK price, while the latter is listed at 8981 SEK.

After dropping the 25% VAT tax from the price of these CPUs, it would result that the Core i7-3960X is priced at $1086 US, or about 786 Euros, while its slower brother has a retail price of $616 US (446 Euros).

Both of these prices are higher than those suggested by previous leaks, $999 and $583 respectively, but they are expected to come down once we are getting nearer to the Sandy Bridge-E release date.

Intel's initial LGA 2011 processor lineup will include three chips, all of them belonging to the Core i7 product line.

As most of you know, the Core i7-3960X is the fastest of these as the Extreme Edition part includes six processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, has a base frequency of 3.3GHz and a maximum clock speed of 3.9GHz, as well as 15MB of Level 3 cache memory.

In comparison, the Core i7-3930K, also includes six processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, but has a base operating clock of 3.2GHz, while the maximum frequency in Turbo mode is set at 3.80GHz.

Cache size has was also reduced, as the Core i7-3930K sports only 12MB of Level 3 cache memory.

Intel is expected to release both of these LGA 2011 chips on November 14, which is also when the first motherboards based on the X79 Express chipset should start making their appearance. (via Nordic Hardware)