Intel X79 looks to become the official name of Intel’s next generation enthusiast chipset. With a launch date set for Q4 2011 Intel has skipped the 6 series of chipsets and instead focus on the 7 series starting with the enthusiast platform LGA2011. Intel X79 has been revealed by leaked slides.
Intel X79 will, just like LGA1366 platform Intel X58, be well endowed. Intel puts focus on workstations and demanding enthusiasts where a lot of the technology comes from the server platform. The socket has 2011 pins, required to handle the quad-channel DDR3 controller of Sandy Bridge-E.
Intel X79 is described as a PCH (platform controller hub) like the siblings Intel P67 and Intel H67 with Sandy Bridge. Even if Intel bakes in a lot of the chipset functionality in the processors there are clear differences between Intel X79 (Panther Point) and Intel P67 (Cougar Point).
Intel Sandy Bridge-E processors will unlike Nehalem on LGA1366 sport a PCI Express hub baked into the processor. Sandy Bridge-E supports 32 PCI Express 2.0 channels and can be compared to 20 channels in Sandy Bridge. This makes it possible for the platform to power two PCIe x16 graphics cards without additional circuits.
The connection between chipset and CPU is also more powerful. Intel doubles the bandwidth between Sandy Bridge-E and Intel X79 with two PCIe x4 channels, for 8GB/s bandwdith.
Intel has done its best to make use of the high bandwidth and has integrated a 10 port SATA 6.0 Gbps RAID controller into X79 while eight of the units can be configured for SAS. The RAID controller supports 0, 1, 5 and 10, but alas there is no USB 3.0. We also find an interface for powering a Gigabit Ethernet network controller.
The Intel LGA2011 platform will launch in Q4 and unlike Sandy Bridge processors, Sandy Bridge-E and Intel X79 will offer good support for overclocking the processor bus and memory.
Source: it.com.cn
