14 DAY TRIAL // Although, in the consumer space, Intel's LGA 1155 motherboard chipsets don't hold any more surprises for most of us, things are different in the server and workstation market as the C200 PCH haven't yet been released, but a recent leak goes to detail a few more of the mysteries of Intel's new Cougar Point controllers.
The new chipsets will be used for the E3-series of Xeon processors, which are based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, Intel planning to release three SKUs into the market, dubbed the C202, C204 and C206.
All the SKUs share a set of common features and can be configured with up to four PCI slots while also featuring PCI-X, ECC and memory parity support.
Making our way from the bottom, we'll start with the C202, the most basic of the new PCH chips.
Just like the desktop version of Cougar Point, this supports 16 lanes of PCI Express bandwidth, from the CPU, as well as eight additional PCIe lanes, which are provided by the C202 chipset.
These are complemented by 12 USB 2.0 ports as well as six SATA 3Gbps ports which offer RAID functionality. No SATA 6Gbps connectors are available.
Next in line is the mid-range C204 which boosts the number of PCI lanes available to 28, while two of the built-in SATA ports gain 6Gbps support.
In addition, the chipset also offers Intel's node manager and DCMI options, features that Intel decided to incorporate only in this SKU.
Finally, we get to the C206, the most powerful of Intel's Xeon E3 chipsets which is designed for entry-level workstation while its two smaller brothers are destined to be used in single socket servers.
Compared to the C204, this chipset gets two additional USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated graphics, integrated HD audio and Intel AMT 7.0 (active management technology) support.
The first Sandy Bridge-based server processors are expected to arrive any day from now and will be released under the Xeon E3-1200 designation. More details about the upcoming models are available here.
Apart from the C200 series, Intel also plans to release the Z68 and the Patsburg chipsets in 2011, according to a recently leaked roadmap. (via SemiAccurate)
