Intel Plans New Revision for LGA 2011 Patsburg PCH Says Report

Even though Intel has released its consumer version of the Patsburg PCH yesterday together with the company's first CPUs based on the high-performance Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the chip maker is apparently still having troubles with the server version of this chipset.

In order to surpass these issues and still release its first Xeon processors built using this new arch in Q1 of 2012, Intel reportedly plans to develop a special version of the PCH that will be known as Patsburg-J.

According to VR-Zone, this revision of the chipset is just an interim solution until the fully fledged version of the PCH should arrive as Intel has run into further problems with the SAS interface.

From the specs that are available now, Patsburg-J seems to be just a re-branded X79 that drops a series of features that aren't needed in the server space.

These include support for some of the 14 USB 2.0 ports, a couple of extra PCI Express x1 lanes, the audio logic found inside the chipset as well as the native PCI support.

Initially, the X79 Express was supposed to include no less than 10 SATA 6Gbps with support for SAS drives as well as an additional PCI-Express 2.0 x4 link that directly connected the CPU to the storage subsystem, but Intel faced all sort of troubles with the platform and had to drop the extra functionality from the chipset.

Instead, the Santa Clara-based company decided to go with the Patsburg-A version of its PCH, which as well all know now, comes without any additional SAS ports and limits the maximum number of SATA devices that can be installed to six, only two of these working at 6Gbps speeds.

This makes the X79 extremely similar with the P67 and Z68 chipsets, so motherboard makers had to add third-party controllers to increase the number of SATA 6Gbps port available and to add USB 3.0 support to their LGA 2011 solutions.

More information about the Intel X79 chipset and the recently launched Sandy Bridge-E processors is available in the Core i7-3690X review we published just yesterday.

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