Intel's chief Paul Otellini gave the opening keynote speech at the Developer forum in San Francisco, and according to the Register he didn't focus much on the server side of the business. This was intentional, as Intel are not yet ready to launch the E5 Sandybridge versions of their processors, not until next year anyway.

The Register spoke to Frank Jensen, an Xeon performance engineer, who said “It's in production this year, and will ship to customers this year. The launch event is actually next year.”

The Xeon E3 range of chips were released this year and Jensen decided to use car analogies, saying they were the “dependable economy car”. The Xeon E5 range will be the ‘mainstream auto' and the Xeon E7 the ‘big rig truck'.

If the E5 chips are released next year, it is a change of date for Intel, who said in July that they would be released by the end of the year, along with the chipset.

As the Register note, AMD are already shipping the 16 core ‘Interlagos' Opteron 6200 processors to OEM customers. They will assuredly be beating Intel to the punch this time around.

Kitguru says: E5 should be a big seller into many businesses who need a little more grunt than the current E3.

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