14 DAY TRIAL // Expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2011, Intel's first desktop processors based on the high-performance Sandy Bridge-E architecture will reportedly ship without PCI Express 3.0 support as Intel wanted to maintain its original release schedule for these CPUs.
The first signs of trouble appeared in mid-July when a series of reports claimed that the Santa Clara chip giant is having troubles with integrating PCI Express 3.0 into their chips due to the lack of add-on cards to use this interface.
As a result, Intel hasn't had the chance of properly testing its PCI Express 3.0 implementation, which forced the company to drop PCIe Gen 3 out of the specifications list for Sandy Bridge-E.
The place of PCI Express 3.0 was taken by the 2.0 version of the standard, the same version that is present in the company's Sandy Bridge processors.
Compared to PCIe 2.0, the third revision of the PCI Express doubles the bandwidth available to devices using it, from 500MB/s per lane in each direction to 1GB/s per lane in each direction.
This means that, a PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slot can provide a total bandwidth of 32GB/s, compared to the 16GB/s available to a similar Gen 2 slot.
According to the latest information to hit the Web, Intel's first Sandy Bridge-E processors will launch in mid-November.
The initial release will include three chips belonging to the Core i7 product line, the mot powerful of these being the Core i7-3960X, which is actually an Extreme Edition part.
This Intel CPU packs six processing cores with HyperThreading support that have a base frequency of 3.30GHz and a maximum clock speed of 3.9GHz (in Turbo mode), and are backed by 15MB of Level 3 cache memory. (via Expreview)