Intel's First Ivy Bridge Pentium CPUs Will Arrive in Q3 2012

In the third quarter of 2012, Intel will reportedly update its processor lineup to feature a new series of Pentium chips based on the company's upcoming Ivy Bridge architecture that will bring a number of improvements over the current SNB core.

Details about these processors are scarce at this moment, but a previous report has revealed that for the upcoming iteration of the Pentium line, Intel will use a new naming scheme that moves from three to a four digit designation.

As a results, the new CPUs will be released into the Pentium G2000-series, but few other specs have changed from their Sandy Bridge counterparts, apart from the TDP that will be rated at 55W, compared to the 65W of the current Pentium CPUs.

What this means is that Pentium processors will still include two computing cores and 3MB of Level 3 cache, while lacking support for more advanced features such as Hyper-Threading or Turbo Boost.

Support for the AES-NI and AVX instructions sets aren't included, as is also the case with the QuickSync video transcoding technology that is limited to the more expensive Intel Core parts.

We also don't know if the Pentium G2000 processors will get the new GPU improvements that Intel is expected to bring with Ivy Bridge, but there is a strong chance that DirectX 11 support will make its way to the Pentium CPU line.

According to Fudzilla, the upcoming Ivy Bridge Pentium processors will inherit the price tags of the current G860 and G850 CPUs, but are going to deliver better performance.

Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips and features basically the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements, including an updated PCI Express 3.0 controller and DirectX 11 support.

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