14 DAY TRIAL // After launching the first Sandy Bridge chips at the beginning of the year, Intel is working feverishly to bring its latest architecture to even lower price points and the company is expected to officially introduce three new Celeron desktop parts, based on the SNB core, in the third quarter of this year.
These will be released under the Celeron G440, G530 and G540 designation and, at this time, virtually no details are available about their specifications.
However, judging from what we know about the recently released mobile Celeron B810 CPU, it is expected that the chips will carry a significantly reduced feature set.
This means no support for Turbo Boost, Hyper Threading, AVX and AES-NI instructions or any other advanced Intel technology.
In addition, the on-die GPU could also be severely crippled as the B810 even lacks support for Clear Video which was developed to offload the CPU from performing media decoding tasks and has been part of all Intel integrated graphics cores ever since the introduction of the GMA 3100.
According to the CPU-World website, the three Celeron processors are expected to ship in the third quarter of 2011, and faster versions of the chips will be launched in Q4 2011 and Q1 2012.
The CPU's are meant to replace the Wolfdale-based E3400 and E3500 models, that were launched in January and August 2010, respectively.
Ever since January when it first launched the second-generation Core i5 and Core i7 processors, Intel has been gradually introducing the Sandy Bridge core into lower priced parts.
First were the Core i3 models that the company has launched in February and, sometime during this quarter, Intel also plans to release a series of Pentium parts built on the new architecture. These will carry the G620, G620T, G840 and G850 designation.