Intel Crystal Forest Gladden platform to launch in Q2

In March Intel is expected to launch Romley server platform, which will be comprised of Xeon E5 microprocessors, and "Patsburg-B" C600 series chipset. Later in the first half of this year Intel will introduce another platform, codenamed Crystal Forest-Server. This platform will also work with Xeon E5-2400 and E5-2600 series processors, but it will utilize Cave Creek chipset. Cave Creek chipset will be also used by embedded platform, codenamed Crystal Forest-Gladden. The platform will be available in the second quarter 2012, and it will include its own line up of Core-class microprocessors, built on "Sandy Bridge-Gladden" core. The Crystal Forest-Gladden platform will be targeted for uni- and dual-processors blade servers, and for dense servers market.

Cave Creek chipset is going to incorporate Intel QuickAssist technology, 4 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, 20 PCIe Gen2 lanes, and 4 DMI 2.0 lanes. QuickAssist technology will provide bulk data encryption/decryption using AES, 3DES or (A)RC4 algorithms, hashing using MD5, SHA-1/2 or HMAC algorithms, Deflate and LZS data compression, and pattern RegEx/pattern matching. The chipset will support VT-d and VT-c virtualization.

According to preliminary information, that we have at hand, Sandy Bridge-Gladden CPUs will integrate 1, 2 or 4 cores, and from 1.5 MB to 8 MB of level 3 cache. Dual-core SB-Gladden chips will be clocked from 1.2 GHz to 2.5 GHz, and quad-cores will have operating frequencies from 1 GHz to 2.6 GHz. The microprocessors will support HyperThreading, Trusted Execution and Virtualization technologies, and incorporate AES and AVX instructions. DDR3 memory controller on these chips will work with DIMM, UDIMM and SO-DIMM ECC memory with data rates up to 1333 MHz, and will have up to 2 channels, each supporting up to 2 DIMMs. All in all, the CPUs will support up to 32 GB of memory. Thermal Design Power of SB-Gladden products will range from 10 Watt to 55 Watt. The processors will be manufactured in BGA package, and, we belive, they will look similar to Intel Core-branded mobile parts.