Sandy Bridge E VT-d broken in launch C1 stepping and will be remedied in C2 stepping

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

More details here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/152978/Sa...er-Launch.html

[Bagnaj97]

Presumably this means any SB-E based Xeons will be C2 stepping or people buying them for virtualisation are in for a shock. I don't see this affecting the consumer chips too badly though.

[kalniel]

Even so, this is not how Intel would have liked to answer the sandybridge chipset problems.

[Jay]

Thats pretty poor to be honest. Although for home my Q6600 is still good enough for me.

[UseItNow]

Will upgrade a month or two after its out to see how it compares against the competition and I do agree with Kalniel.

[shaithis]

At least it's not as bad as the Pentium bug!

[scaryjim]

At least it's not as bad as the Pentium bug!

That depends on what you mean by "not as bad". For the general public it'll almost certainly go unnoticed, but then very few members of the general public would be buying SB-E anyway. It's targetted at the workstation market, and lacking hardware virtualisation support in that market is pretty much commercial suicide. Sure, there won't be SB-E jokes circulating the internet for the next decade, but the actual hit to Intel's business could be every bit as bad - particularly if AMD do a good job will Bulldozer: "sure, we've got a new 8 core chip with working virtualisation, how many workstations did you want?"...