14 DAY TRIAL // Acer is reportedly preparing to launch the Acer V3 line of laptops in Japan. The V3 will come with 8GB of DDR3 memory and a plain 15-inch glossy screen.
As usual, Japan gets all the goodies. It’s not that much that they’re closer to Taiwan and China, as it’s about the fact that the average income is so much higher, that everything new is selling for around double the price, and every device manufacturer wants a taste of those profits.
Acer is preparing to launch a more down-to-earth laptop using Intel’s new Ivy Bridge architecture.
This is a regular 15” laptop with a wide 15.6” screen size, sporting a regular 1366 x 768 HD resolution.
It is powered by Intel’s Core i7-3612GQ processor. We’ve practically never heard of this GQ version. Surprisingly, Bing and Google return zero results when we try to search for it.
We believe it’s likely related to the Core i7-3612QE and the Core i7-3612QM.
These are mobile processors with four cores that run at a reference default of 2800 MHz.
When only two cores are loaded, the frequency may go up to 3000MHz, and when a single threaded application is working, one core may reach as high as 3100 MHz.
The processors are HyperThreading enabled so they’ll be able to handle eight threads at a time. There, the Level 2 cache size is 4 x 256 KB, while all the cores are kept fed by 6 MB of Level 3 cache.
Both CPUs come with HD 4000 iGPU that works at a default of 650 MHz, but in Turbo mode it will clock up to 1000 MHz for the Core i7-3612QE and a higher 1100 MHz for the Core i7-3612QM.
Along with the fact that the Core i7-3612QE is an embedded processor that also supports ECC memory, the difference in iGPU Turbo clocks are the only thing that distinguishes between the two CPUs.
This still doesn’t tell us clearly what the characteristics of the Core i7-3612GQ processor are, but it introduces us to its non-identical twins.
The starting price will be around 1,114 USD. That’s around 840 EUR for the European buyers, but at this price, we still might go for MSI’s gaming series rather than Acer’s V3.