Intel to Release Two Sandy Bridge Pentium CPUs in Q2 2011

The Intel Pentium mobile processor family is set to receive at least two new CPUs built on the Sandy Bridge architecture by the end of the second quarter of 2011. The chips will be called the B940 and B950 and will make their appearance in HP's business laptops as well as other notebook models.

Both chips will use the current G2 socket and packs 2MB of shared Level 2 cache, just as Intel's mobile Celeron chips.

The operating frequencies are set at 2GHz for the B940 and at 2.1GHz for the B950, while their TDPs are rated at 35W, just as the majority of Intel's mobile processors.

Other specifications are still unknown at this time, but these are designed to sit between the company's Celeron and Core i3 lines of processors, and should share features similar to both of these product families.

Right now, there is a pretty large discrepancy between Intel's Celeron and Core i3 CPUs as the former lacks most of the features of its older brother including support for Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost, Quick Sync, the AVX instruction set or Intel's WiDi technology.

The integrated graphics core found inside the B810 has also been crippled beyond recognition as it doesn't even pack support for the company's Clear Video technology.

This has been part of Intel's GPUs ever since the days of the GMA 3100 graphics core and its job is to offload the CPU from video decoding tasks.

Some of the first machines to get the Pentium B940 and B950 processors are the HP 431 and HP 630 business notebooks which are currently available with various Pentium Arrandale and Penryn CPUs.

The exact release date of these Sandy Bridge based processors is not yet known at this time, but CPU-World states that Intel plans to launch them together with its desktop Pentium chips, which means a Q2 2011 release.