Intel to Launch Its Fastest Sandy Bridge CPU in Q2 2011

Intel will soon expand its Xeon processor family with the addition of the E3-1290 CPU, which, thanks to its 3.6GHz base operating frequency, will become the fastest Sandy Bridge chip in the company's lineup.

The Xeon E3-1290 was spotted for the first time at the beginning of April in an 1U rackmount server, produced by Japan Computing Systems.

However, its release date was uncertain at that time, but according to some documents seen by the CPU-World publication, we now know that Intel plans to launch the CPU by the end of Q2 2011.

As mentioned earlier, the Xeon E3-1290 will be clocked at 3.6GHz and it features four processing cores as well as Hyper-Threading support.

In addition, the chip also sports 8MB of shared L3 cache, support for DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 memory, and its TDP is rated at 95W.

While its thermal envelope is identical with that of Intel's current Xeon E3-1200 series processors, the company does state that it "requires [a] high efficiency heatsink capable of maintaining 85C Tcase."

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 bring a number of improvements to the table, 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, 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.