There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet: Sandy Bridge Gets Two New Models

You would think that with Intel having recently released their Ivy Bridge CPUs, that the preceding Sandy Bridge CPUs would be retired, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it, however. Instead, they will be releasing the low end Core i3-2308M and Core i3-2365M CPUs at the beginning of September, targeted at laptops. It turns out that these are in fact just lower end versions of already low end mobile CPUs.

Both CPUs have just two cores, with 3MB L3 cache shared between them. They will include Intel’s HD 3000 graphics and will support DDR3-1333 memory. They support Hyper-Threading and VT-x virtualization, but will not support more advanced technologies such as Turbo Boost, VT-d virtualization, TXT or AES.

The Core i3-2308M runs at 2.1GHz, with the iGPU running at 650MHz base clock and 1100MHz turbo clock speeds. The CPU has a 35W TDP and will be aimed at mainstream notebooks. Manufactured in a PGA package, its featureset is identical to the Core i3-2310M, with the difference being that the 2308M doesn’t support Intel Small Business Advantage (SBA).

The Core i3-2365M runs at 1.4GHz and has a frugal 17W TDP, with doubtless accompanying frugal performance. The iGPU runs at 350MHz, with a surprisingly high turbo speed of 1GHz. Note that notebooks with this CPU won’t qualify for the ultrabook logo. This CPU is identical to the Core i3-2367M, with the exception that it doesn’t support SBA. With Ivy Bridge now being the current platform, it’s not really surprising to see that Intel isn’t releasing high end Sandy Bridge parts any more. The real question is why they’re not retiring Sandy Bridge altogether.