Intel has made a splash with their Sandy Bridge parts; for being in the middle-range they keep up with the higher end of the prior generation in many applications. We have heard rumors of new Atom-level parts from Intel deviating from their on-chip GPU structure that Sandy Bridge promotes. What about the next level? What about Celeron.
I’m guessing less than an i7.
Details were posted to CPU-World about Intel’s upcoming Sandy Bridge-based Celeron processors. There are three variants listed each supporting Intel’s on-chip GPU. The G440 is a single core part clocked at 1.6 GHz with a 650 MHz GPU where the G530 and G540 are both dual core parts clocked at 2.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz respectively and both with an 850 MHz GPU. The dual core parts have a 2MB L3 cache though the article is inconsistent on whether the single core part has 1 or 2 MB of L3 cache though we will assume 1 MB due to the wording of the article. While the GPU performance differs between the single core and dual core parts both will Turbo Boost to a maximum of 1GHz as need arises.
Functionally the chips will only contain the bare minimum of Sandy Bridge core features like 64-bit and virtualization support. There are still currently no further details on launch date and pricing. But if you are waiting to upgrade your lower end devices rest assured that Sandy B is there for you; at some point, at least.