The socket was released on 14 November 2011, and supports Sandy Bridge E-series processors with 4 memory channels of DDR3-1600, as well as, 40× PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 lanes; The Extreme Edition processor supports six cores with 15 MB of shared L3 cache on a ring bus, a quad-channel DDR3 memory controller and two QPI links. LGA 2011 motherboards have either 4 or 8 DIMM slots which allows for a maximum support of 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of memory. Socket 2011 also has to ensure platform scalability beyond eight cores and 20 MB of cache.

• Sandy Bridge-E processors do not ship with standard Intel CPU-coolers, instead Intel is planning on offering their own liquid-cooling solutions, which will be sold separately.