14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's recent product change notifications have given us reason to hope that things won't, in fact, get all that awkward when the Broadwell series of central processing units finally comes out in late 2014.
One might wonder why we'd say such a thing, when said change notices refer only to a pair of Ivy Bridge Core-series CPUs.
The explanation is related to a rumor we covered in late November, about Ivy Bridge CPUs lingering past their time.
According to murmurs on the Internet, Intel was supposedly considering an extension for Core i3, i5 and i7 Ivy Bridge central processing units.
This, in turn, would make things awkward come Q4 2014, because Haswell chips would also have to be extended, roadmap-wise, potentially causing an overlap with the Broadwell scheduled for the last months of next year.
The new product change notices though, or one of them, says that two Ivy Bridge chips of more than decent performance are starting to phase out of the market.
Then again, it could be taken the other way around as well, since said CPUs, both Core i7 units, will be available for supplier orders until June 27, 2014, and keep shipping until December 5, which does indicate overlap with Broadwell (and we thought a Haswell-Broadwell overlap would be troublesome).
Anyway, the two central processing units are called Core i7-3820QM (2.7 GHz clock speed) and Core i7-3720QM (2.6 GHz core frequency).
As the QM suffix indicates, they are laptop processors (Q stands for quad-core, M stands for mobile), which may also explain why they still have so much time left. Despite the higher power draw compared to Haswell and Broadwell, they are cheaper, while still reasonably mighty, so makers of notebooks tend to appreciate their services and will probably keep doing so for as long as these chips exist.