There has been a great deal of rumours lately regarding of the possible Intel Sandy Bridge-E launch and although some of them were pretty solid regarding the info that Sandy Bridge-E will wait for the next year, Donanimhaber.com managed to score couple of Intel slides that show that we'll see three LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E models in Q4 2011.
According to the latest leaked slide, Intel will launch three models based on socket LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E including six-core Core i7-3960X and Core i7-3930K as well as the quad-core Core i7-3820. All three models are placed in Q4 2011 column. According to some rumours, the first wave of motherboards will be based on Patsburg-A/B chipsets that have less SATA 6Gbps ports compared to Patsburg-D chipset, but hopefully we won't wait too long for the top chipset as well.
According to another set of slides, the upcoming Core i7-3960X will be a bit faster than the Intel current high-end Core i7-990X EE CPU in at least some benchmarks including the Cinebench 11.5, POV-Ray 3.7, 3DMark 11, ProShow Gold 4.5, SPEC CPU2006 and Sandra 2011B. These results doesn't come as a surprise considering that the Core i7-3960X EE has an increased memory bandwidth, a bit more cache (15MB compared to 12MB on the Core i7-990X) and features Intel AVX.
You can check out the launch schedule slide here while the performance slides can be found here.
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PC Hardware
Sandy Bridge-E comes in Q4 2011 after all
Three models paired up with Patsburg-A/B chipset