Last month, there reports of Intel pushing its Sandy Bridge-E enthusiast desktop platform to 2011. It was originally scheduled for 2011, but was reportedly delayed to 2012 because of issues Intel was facing with its flagship desktop chipset, codenamed Patsburg-D. Intel will be launching Sandy Bridge-E this year, but the first wave of motherboards will feature Patsburg-A/B chipsets, which have fewer SATA 6 Gb/s ports than Patsburg-D.

Intel put its launch plans on paper with its latest desktop platform roadmap, that shows the first three models of socket LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors, the six-core Core i7-3960X, Core i7-3930K, and the quad-core Core i7-3820, featuring in the Q4 2011 column. The roadmap shows that the three processors will hold their market-positions till Q2-2012, when Intel will release faster models to displace them. The roadmap slide also shows that Ivy Bridge, Intel's next-generation socket LGA1155 processors that are built on the 22 nm fab process, will be released in March or April 2012, and not early 2012 as speculated earlier.