14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has reaffirmed its plans to retire a series of Sandy Bridge processors introduced at the beginning of 2011, presumably to make room in its lineup for the company’s upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs scheduled to arrive in Q2 of 2012.
The chip maker has announced its decision through a Product Change Notification (PCN) document ehich covers no less than five CPUs in the Pentium, Core i3 and Core i5-series.
More specifically, the chips affected are the Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T, both tray and boxed, as well as the Pentium G840, G620 and G620T.
Customers can place orders for these chips until June 29 of 2012. The last shipments of tray Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T will be sent towards customers on December 7, 2012, while boxed CPUs will be shipped as long as supplies last.
Both the Core i5-2300 and the Core i3-2100T were part of the first Sandy Bridge chips released by Intel at the start of 2011 when the architecture became official.
As far as the three Pentium CPUs announced are concerned, these also represented a first for the chip makers as they were its premier Pentium-branded models to be built on the Sandy Bridge architecture, when they were introduced back in Q2 of 2011.
Since their arrival however, Intel kept releasing new Sandy Bridge parts that have improved upon the specs of these early second-generation Core and Pentium CPUs, making them obsolete.
In addition, in 2012 Intel will introduce a new series of processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture so it needs to make room in its lineup for these upcoming SKUs.
As far as we know, the first Ivy Bridge processors will be available on April 8 and the initial release will include third-generation Core i5 and Core i7 desktop products, and Core i7 mobile chips.