Intel Plans to Retire Several Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 CPUs in 2012

Intel has just announced its plans to retire five Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 CPUs released earlier this year from its product lineup, including three Pentium processors and two second generation Core models built using the 32nm fabrication node.

The chip maker announced its decision through a Product Change Notification (PCN) document which says that market demand for these chips has shifted to other Intel products.

The processors affected are the Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T, both tray and boxed, as well as the Pentium G840, G620 and G620T.

Customers can place orders for these chips until June 29 of 2012. The last shipments of tray Core i5-2300 and Core i3-2100T will be sent towards customers on December 7, 2012, while boxed CPUs will be shipped as long as supplies last.

Both the Core i5-2300 and the Core i3-2100T were part of the first Sandy Bridge chips released by Intel at the start of 2011 when the architecture became official.

As far as the three Pentium CPUs announced are concerned, these also represented a first for the chip makers as they were its premier Pentium-branded models to be built on the Sandy Bridge architecture, when they were introduced back in Q2 of 2011.

Since their arrival however, Intel kept releasing new Sandy Bridge parts that have improved upon the specs of these early second-generation Core and Pentium CPUs, making them obsolete.

In addition, in 2012 Intel will introduce a new series of processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture so it needs to make room in its lineup for these upcoming SKUs.

After the Core i5-2300 and the Core i3-2100T will be retired from Intel’s lineup, their place will be taken by the i5-2310 and i3-2120T, both of these coming with 100MHz higher clocks than their current counterparts.

The three Pentium models will be replaced by the Pentium G850, Pentium G630 and Pentium G630T, respectively.

Posted in: Hardware, News, Preview