Ivy Bridge-E supports PCI-E 3.0

When Sandy Bridge-E first arrived support for PCI Express Generation 3 was not certified or listed. Nvidia later released a patch to allow X79 systems to support PCI Express 3.0 as they were hardware ready. It also didn’t help that Sandy Bridge-E turned up largely well before the first PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards arrived.

Ivy Bridge-E is expected for Q3 of 2013, about a year from now. The Ivy Bridge-E platform is immediately ready for PCI Express 3.0 unlike Sandy Bridge-E which required some tweaking first. Obviously, you would of expected PCI Express 3.0 support as Ivy Bridge had it too and these are just enlarged Ivy Bridge processors with more cores (to try and explain it as simply as possible).

With support for 40 lane PCI Express 3.0 on the new Ivy Bridge-E processors that gives 8X/8X/8X/8X PCI Express 3.0 support out of the box without the need for any PLX PCI Express 3.0 bridge chips that add latency to the system. The new Ivy Bridge-E processors also pack native memory controllers capable of quad channel 1866MHz memory.

Intel certainly isn’t rushing development of its high performance platform – probably due to a lack of competition from AMD. The rumoured i7 3970X is taking an absolute age to come to market too.

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