14 DAY TRIAL // Though not precisely in official capacity, a few of the rumors we have reported and speculated on recently, concerning Intel's processor plans, have been confirmed.
For one, last week we mentioned how the Haswell-EP processors were scheduled for release in 2014, allowing Sandy Bridge-E a longer market life.
Secondly, we learned that a Sandy Bridge-E SKU was in the making, called Core i7- 3970X, but we did not have all relevant info on it and could only guess at when it would be available.
The folks at VR-Zone are the people responsible for clarifying most things concerning these two matters, having published a roadmap slide.
The Core i7-3970X, being a Sandy Bridge E with 6 cores, will have 12 threads, a clock speed of 3.5 GHz, a Turbo Boost frequency of 4 GHz and a cache memory of 15 MB.
It is compatible with the LGA 2011 socket (X79 motherboards, present and future) and needs 150W of energy to work. Its release is set for the fourth quarter of this year (2012).
All in all, it is essentially a stronger incarnation of the Core i7-3960X, which comes with 3.3 GHz / 3.4 GHz Turbo performance, albeit lower energy requirements (130W).
There is one last thing we need to talk about here, and that is the Core i5-3350P CPU, based on the Ivy Bridge architecture.
It will have the integrated GPU disabled but more than decent computing prowess, with its 4 cores, 4 threads (no Hyper-Threading), 3.1 GHz frequency, 3.3 GHz Turbo Boost overclocking and 6 MB of L3 cache.
Intel's chip will be compatible with socket LGA 1155 mainboards and will need 69W of energy.
It is interesting to see that Intel's roadmap labels the Core i5-3350P as a Q4 2013 product. Due to fiscal/calendar year incongruity, however, fourth quarter doesn't mean the same period of time for everyone.
Long story short, it is most likely that, like the Sandy Bridge-E, the i5-3350P will be released late in the third quarter of 2012.