Core i7, Celerons and Atoms break cover in the latter half of the year.
It seems that Intel's fourth-quarter 2009 roadmap has been published online by Dodgytimes.
Compiling data from Taiwan's motherboard makers, Dodgy says there is a spate of new processors to be launched by Intel later this year, including a Core i7, several Celerons and new single- and dual-core Atoms.
A new Core i7 960, running at 3.2GHz, will replace the current non-extreme top o' the crop 950 and should also guarantee the extinction of the Core i7 965EE, as Intel would have a hard time explaining why you'd have to pay $447 more for the extra QPI bandwidth.
The Celerons will get a boost with the release of the E3000-series, with the E3200 and E3300 clocking in at 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz respectively, both with an 800MHz FSB and 1MB of L2 cache, and now also with the new and improved VT-x virtualization. These will line up against AMD's Athlon II X2 series processors in both price and performance.
Finally, the Atom 230 and 330 processors will be replaced by the D410 and D510, respectively, at the time of introduction of the Pine Trail two-chip platform. This also means GMA500 graphics and the CPU mounted in the same package. As Intel put it just a few weeks ago, this should bring down OEMs' bill of materials costs and send profits up.
Intel really should change its "we don't comment on unannounced products" line to "we don't comment on unannounced products announced by our partners", eh?
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Issue: 106 | November, 2009