14 DAY TRIAL // Together with the high-performance Xeon E7 processor range, Intel has also made official its first server chips built using the company's latest Sandy Bridge architecture, dubbed the Xeon E3-1200, that are destined to be used in single socket servers and workstations.
Compared to their desktop counterparts, these chips 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.
The new 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.
Five of the new models also pack integrated graphics, but only four of these feature the P3000 GPU.
Together with the new chips, Intel has also made official the C200-series motherboard chipsets which were specifically designed for these CPUs.
Right now, the series includes three PCH models, the C202, C204 and C206, and all of them feature support for Intel's Rapid Storage Technology, an integrated MAC, four legacy PCI ports and six SATA connectors.
In the C202, all of these work at SATA 3Gbps speeds, but in the senior chipsets Intel has added 6Gbps functionality to two of these ports.
The C206 is the only one of the three to feature support for Intel HD graphics and Active Management Technology 7.0 (AMT).
The Xeon processor E3-1200 family ranges in price from $189 to $612 in quantities of 1,000 and the chips are available right now in machines built by various OEMs as well as in the retail channel.