14 DAY TRIAL // Although Intel's Sandy Bridge E CPUs aren't supposed to make their appearance until the end of the year, the very first details about the upcoming Patsburg chipset, which offers support for the new processor line, have been uncovered, Intel planning to launch no less than four SKUs based on this chip.
Patsburg is scheduled to be released in the third quarter of 2011 and will be used together with Xeon processors based on the Sandy Bridge EP architecture.
As a result, the chipset features as much as two LGA-2011 CPU sockets and supports quad memory channels.
Taking a look at the slide provided by the SemiAccurate website reveals that Intel plans to release no less than four SKUs based on this chipset.
As the current P67 and H67, Patsburg will sport a simple PCH (platform controller hub) design, and connects to the processor via a DMI 2 interface which delivers four lanes of PCI Express 2.0 worth of bandwidth.
All the SKUs include support for up to 14 USB 2.0 ports, four SATA 3Gbps ports, two SATA 6Gbps ports, ONFi interface as well as up to eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes and HD audio.
The A SKU comes as pretty much a vanilla version of the Patsburg chipset, but features support for an additional four SATA 6Gbps ports via an expander, while the B model swaps the SATA 6Gbps ports available for SAS 6Gbps.
Moving to the D SKU, this adds four PCI Express 3.0 lanes in order to deliver enough bandwidth for the eight SATA 6Gbps or SAS 6Gbps ports that are installed.
Finally, the T SKU takes all the features that were employed in designing the D model and adds RAID 5 support for the installed SAS drives as well as a built-in non-volatile SRAM memory.
No other details are available at this time.