Apr 11, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Even though just a few days have passed since Intel has made official the Xeon E3-1200 series of processors, the Santa Clara based company is already working to add a new CPU to this line, dubbed the E3-1290, which should become the fastest Sandy Bridge-based Xeon chip in Intel's portfolio.

At present, the fastest Xeon E3 CPU available is the E3-1280 model which features four processing cores and comes clocked at 3.5GHz (up to 3.9GHz via Turbo Boost).

In comparison, the upcoming Xeon E3-1290 should have its operating frequency set at 3.6GHz, while it will still feature a quad-core design, 8MB of shared Level 3 cache, HyperThreading support, a 5GT/s DMI and an integrated dual-channel controller which supports up to 32GB of DDR3-1333MHz memory.

According to CPU-World, its TDP will be set at the same 95W level as the current E3-1280 and the Intel HD integrated graphics unit will be disabled.

The exact shipping date and the pricing of the new Xeon E3 CPU model aren't known at this time.

Right now, the Xeon E3-1200 processor series is comprised out of 11 CPUs which pack four processing cores, feature support for Intel's Turbo Boost and HyperThreading technologies and 6MB or 8MB of L3 cache memory.

The only exception to this rule is the low power Xeon E3-1220L which comes equipped with only two processing cores and 3MB of L3 cache, but has a TDP of just 20W.

Compared to their desktop counterparts, Intel's Xeon E3 processors include a number of improvements, and the most important of these is the addition of ECC memory support.

Other specific features include support for two PCI Express 2.0 slots, one x16 slot that can be split into a pair of x8 and one x4 slot, Intel HD P3000 graphics, in selected models, that is certified for Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor and Adobe CS4 and other applications, as well as Intel VT-x and vPro support.