14 DAY TRIAL // Intel continues to make room in its product lineup for new processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture and recently announced that 2012 will mark the retirement of several LGA 1156 and LGA 775 CPUs.
This decision affects some of the first dual-core Clarkdale processors introduced by the chip maker, the Core i5-661 and Core i3-530, as well as the older Pentium E5700, Celeron E3500 and Celeron E3400 CPUs.
Intel will take orders for the two Clarkdale processors until April 27, 2012 while the last shipments to go out the company's gates are planned for October 5, 2012.
As far as the three other Pentium and Celeron chips are concerned, these can be ordered by Intel's partners until December 30, 2011. The last shipments of tray processors will be completed by June 8th, 2012.
The boxed versions of both the LGA 1156 and LGA 775 CPUs are expected to last for a bit longer as the company will continue to ship them until it depletes its stock.
Clarkdale was Intel's first processor architecture to be built using the 32nm fabrication node and it was introduced in January of 2010 at the CES fair.
In addition to being built using this advanced fabrication process, Clarkdale was also based on a new design approach that included both the PCI Express controller and the memory controller as well as a graphics core inside the processor.
The GPU is placed on a separate die built using the 45nm production node and it connects to the processor via the chip's memory interface.
Intel didn't mentioned any replacements for the discontinued products, but currently there are plenty of other options from which users can choose from.
All throughout the year, Intel has retired many of its older processors from the market as the company has almost revamped its entire product range with new CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.