14 DAY TRIAL // After earlier today it announced that the Core i7-970 processor is heading for retirement, Intel has issued a new series of Product Change Notifications (PCNs) that informed its partners about the company's plans to discontinue three other processors.
All of these CPUs are ultra-low voltage mobile parts and were launched a little bit more than an year ago, in the second quarter of 2010.
The chips in question are the Core i7-660UM, the Core i5-540UM and the entry-level Celeron U3400.
Intel partners can still place orders for these chips until January 27, 2012, while the last shipping date is listed as July 6, 2012.
All three processors are built on the 32nm fabrication process using the Westmere architecture, have a TDP rating of 18W, and are used in ultra-portable notebooks as well as in other highly compact and energy efficient computing products.
The fastest of the three chips, the Core i7-660UM, packs two processing cores with HyperThreading support, 4MB of Level 3 cache memory, an integrated dual-channel memory controller, on-die graphics and Turbo Boost support.
Its base clock speed is set at 1.33GHz and Turbo Boost enables it to reach up to 2.4GHz, when only a single core is active.
The less powerful Core i5-540UM also sports two processing cores and support for the HyperThreading and Turbo Boost technologies, but its cores are clocked at 1.2GHz, while the maximum Turbo frequency is set at 2GHz.
Finally, the third chip to be discontinued, the Celeron U3400 features a dual-core design with HyperThreading and Turbo Boost disabled. Its operating clock is set at 1.06GHz, while L3 cache is limited at 2MB.
The three Intel chips can be replaced with faster Sandy Bridge processors, which sport a much more powerful integrated graphics unit and an improved feature set.