14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Intel's activities on the central processing unit market are mostly about Ivy Bridge now, the Sandy bridge architecture is still around, and some of them still play the roles of primary mainstream laptop platforms.
The Core i3 line of CPUs is the one seen as mid-range, even though one would think that title would go to Core i5, being between Core i3 and Core i7.
That is not really the case though. Pentium and Celeron units have the low-end, Core i3 has the mid-range, Core i5 gets the upper mainstream/high-end and Core i7 are made solely for enthusiasts with no money constraints.
Among the Core i3 CPUs that sell and are based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, rather than Ivy Bridge, there are the Core i3-23x8M and i3-23x5M.
Soon, there will be a Core i3-2375M chip up for sale as well, though not as a standalone unit, since that isn't practical for laptop processors. Instead, it will ship as a selectable chip on notebooks.
Speaking of which, Intel Core i3-2375M can be seen in HP's Pavilion Sleekbook 14 and Pavilion Ultrabook 14. The Sleekbook 15 and Pavilion Ultrabook 15 laptop PCs also have it.
A dual-core, it has a base clock speed of 1.5 GHz (100 MHz above the Core i3-2365M) and a cache memory of 3 MB L3, plus DDR3-1333 memory support.
No hint is given of any sort of dynamic overclocking technology (Turbo Boost), but 1.5 GHz should be fine for documents, web browsing, etc.
Hyper-threading isn't mentioned, but should be supported, as should AVX instructions. The BGA package will probably be used as well.
What's more, the CPU has a thermal design power (TDP) of 17W, which is just the type of TDP that ultrabooks need, and allows the chip to be called a ULV processor (ultra low voltage).