14 DAY TRIAL // Intel seems to have hit further problems with the upcoming Waimea Bay platform that includes the company's high-performance Sandy Bridge-E processors and the X79 chipset, as a recent report claims that future LGA 2011 consumer motherboards will feature only two SATA 6Gbps ports.
This latest information comes from the VR-Zone website, which claims that Intel has faced a series of issues which forced it to go with the most basic version of the Patsburg PCH for the X79 chipset.
The version that Intel had to rely on is called the Patsburg-A and, unlike its older siblings, it comes without any additional SAS ports thus limiting the maximum number of SATA devices that can be installed to six, only two of these working at 6Gbps speeds.
The report doesn't go on to explain why Intel was forced to take this decision, but it suggests that timing was the main culprit as the company is in a hurry to release its new processors and platform before the Christmas holiday season.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the same publication revealed that Intel initially wanted to go with the Patsburg-D chipset for the X79, but it then decided to downgrade it to Patsburg-B to launch the platform by the end of 2011.
Together with the X79 PCH, Intel is also expected to launch three processors based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the fastest of which being the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition.
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, which are backed by 15MB of Level 3 cache memory.
Next up, is the Core i7-3930K, which also includes six processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, but has only 12MB of L3 cache and a base operating clock of 3.2GHz, while the maximum frequency in Turbo mode is set at 3.80GHz.
Outside of the two processors mentioned above, Intel's initial Sandy Bridge-E desktop launch will also include the Core i7-3820.
This is the slowest of the three CPUs to be launched as it features only four processing cores with a base clock speed of 3.60 GHz and a maximum Turbo speed of 3.90 GHz. These are accompanied by 10MB of Level 3 cache memory.
