The All New LGA 2011 and Sandy Bridge-E for Enthusiasts

Frankly speaking, Intel wasn't raring to go to reveal lots of details about the new Sandy Bridge-E & LGA 2011. & there are several reasons behind it. Obviously, they already know everything they desired to know about these new products. They will come out soon, so at this point you may even find some benchmark results of the engineering samples available online. The second reason why Intel was so restrained is the fact that there is not that much to tell about these CPUs, because they cannot boast any unique technological innovations. Sandy Bridge-E is the same exact Sandy Bridge, & for the most part the differences are actually in the number of processor cores & the connection between them.

In fact, the next slide shows clearly that there won't be anything new about the Sandy Bridge-E processors & LGA 2011 platforms, which Intel codenamed Waimea Bay.

Desktop Sandy Bridge-E processors will be manufactured using well-familiar 32 nm production process & will have or 6 computational cores depending on the CPU model. Note that they will lose the graphics core, but instead they will receive a bigger L3 cache & an enhanced four-channel memory controller supporting DDR3-1333. The L3 cache in this case will be 15 MB giant. In other words, the main advantage of the upcoming LGA 2011 platform will be high performance, which must be delivered at any cost:

 Increased number of computational cores;

 Hyper-Threading know-how support;

 Turbo Boost know-how support;

 Larger L3 cache;

 Four-channel memory controller;

 High clock frequencies.

Unlike LGA 1155, the new LGA 2011 platform is aimed at experienced fans & betting fans that is why Intel pays special attention to the ability to make use of high-performance graphics sub-systems made of several graphics accelerators. LGA 2011 systems have as lots of as 36 PCI Express 2.0 lanes. And incidentally, Intel said that they will also support PCI Express 3.0, although at this point they haven't even passed their certification yet. Later on, however, when actual AMD & Nvidia graphics cards featuring this interface come out, they will all work at full speed, without losing any of the graphics bus speed.