14 DAY TRIAL // As new central processing units are getting ready to debut, Intel is cleaning house in a way that might make even the most blasé of people raise their eyebrows, if only because of the sheer number of soon-to-be-gone chips.
The Ivy Bridge series of CPUs will soon leave way for Haswell, which makes the Sandy Bridge line more or less obsolete.
Aiming to clear up its supply chain before it starts inflicting losses due to oversupply, Intel had decided to discontinue a bunch of Sandy Bridge chips.
And by a bunch, we mean no less than 28 desktop units from the Pentium, Celeron, Core i5 and Core i3 families. The complete lists are as follows.
G460, G465, G530, G530T, G540, G540T, G550, G550T and G555 from the Celeron line.
G620, G622, G630, G630T, G640, G640T, G645, G645T, G850, G860, G860T and G870 from the Pentium collection.
Core i3-2100, i3-2102, i3-2120, i3-2120T, i3-2125 and i3-2130 for the Core i3 line, and a single Core i5 central processing unit called Core i5-2390T.
This information has been put together from all the product change notification documents that Intel sent us, and all other subscribers, over the past few days.
All the CPUs can still be ordered until August 23 this year (2013), but then the chance will be gone, although shipments will continue until February 7, 2014. Businesses that like either of the units might want to polish their negotiation skills in advance.
Boxed CPUs will be shipped while supplies last, but the G540, G850 and i3-2120 are also available as embedded parts, and will go on selling in that form, though not as consumer-ready desktop units.
Then again, the 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture has mostly replaced Sandy Bridge, so consumers shouldn't even feel the disappearance of all these computer parts, despite their number.