A number of weeks ago it was widely reported that Intel had decided to delay the release of their Sandy Bridge E platform until January 2012. Now VR-Zone, who broke the story of the delay first, is reporting that Intel will release the chip at the end of the year albeit with less features.

The apparent cuts that Intel is willing to make to ensure this chip makes it to market by the end of 2011 are the PCI Express 3.0 storage link to the CPU and four of the planned eight SATA/SAS 6bps ports.

Intel planned for Sandy Bridge-E to be their first PCI-Express 3.0 enabled CPU. VR-Zone claims that Intel is investigating some sort of solution to add the features post launch be it a second revision of the X79 chipset or a BIOS patch.