Intel to Retire Another Batch of 32nm CPUs in 2012

Intel has just released another one of its famous Product Discontinuance Notices, PCN for short, which announces the retirement of no less than nine mobile processors, six of these being based on the 32nm Arrandale architecture.

The products affected by this change are the Intel Core i5-560M, i5-560UM, i5-580M, i7-640M , i7-660LM, i7-680UM, i7-840QM, i7-740QM and the i7-940XM Extreme Edition CPU.

According to the PCN announcing this change, all the processors can still be ordered until April 5, 2012 by Intel's partners, while the last shipments are scheduled to be sent out in about a year from now, on October 8, 2012.

The first six processors targeted by Intel for retirement are built using the 32nm manufacturing process, use a dual-core design and their frequencies range between 1.33GHz and 2.8GHz.

As mentioned earlier, these chips are based on the Arrendale architecture that is basically a 32nm die-shrink of Nehalem with integrated graphics and an integrated PCI Express controller.

In addition to these CPUs, Intel also plans to retire three mobile Clarksfield processors which were fabricated using the 45nm process technology and were introduced in the third quarter of 2009.

The move was pretty much expected as the second generation Core processors are far superior to their Clarksfield-based counterparts, which deliver lower performance as well as lower battery life.

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, like the Core i3-2350M and i3-2367M which were just spotted a little bit earlier today.