14 DAY TRIAL // In the last quarter of this year, Intel is expected to make official its first Xeon E5-1600 and E5-2600 processors built on the company's high-performance Sandy Bridge-EP architecture and a recent report comes to unveil additional details about these chips as well as about the platforms they are used for.
The initial launch will pair the chips with the C600-series (Patsburg-B) chipsets, as part of the Romley platform, but the first quarter of 2012 will mark the introduction of the Crystal Forest-Server platform.
This is comprised out of the Cave Creek chipset and of the Xeon E5-2600 CPU and brings quite a few improvements over Patsburg-B.
These include support for Intel's QuickAssist technology, an additional PCI Express 2.0 interconnect between the CPU and PCH (x8 to x16), a higher number of Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as support for asynchronous DRAM refresh.
As far as the upcoming Xeon E5-1600 and E5-2600 processors are concerned, these will feature between four and eight processing cores and can handle up to two threads per core thanks to the HyperThreading technology.
Their TDP will be rated between 50 and 95 Watts and include all the technologies that come standard with the Sandy Bridge architecture outside of the on-die graphics core.
Intel's Xeon E5 chips will boast up to 20 MB L3 cache, 2 QPI links, 40 PCIe Gen3 lanes, 4 DMI 2.0 lanes, and an integrated quad-channel DDR3 memory controller that support up to three DIMMs per channel for a maximum of 96GB.
The Xeons will work with registered and unregistered DDR3 memory, including low-voltage DIMMs, and support speeds up to 1600MHz.
Both E5-1600 and E5-2600 processors are compatible with socket R (LGA 2011) motherboards and the 2600 series CPUs can be used in dual-socket servers.
As mentioned earlier, the Xeon E5-1600 and E5-2600 processors will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. An engineering sample chip has already been listed on eBay where it sells for $1,359.99. (via CPU-World)
