Intel’s 2012 Mobile Ivy Bridge CPU Lineup Revealed

About two weeks after a series of leaked slides revealed both the names and the specs of Intel’s desktop Ivy Bridge processors, a new set of Intel documents somehow made their way to the Web to detail the mobile version of these future CPUs.

Just as Intel’s mobile Sandy Bridge processor lineup, the chip maker’s new mobile SKUs will also be split between standard voltage and low power models, although it now appears that Intel has decided to kill Low Voltage or LV series.

This leaves us with only standard voltage and Ultra Low Voltage CPUs, the latter being known from 2012 onwards only as Ultra or U-Series processors, while CPUs in the former category will be known as M-Series CPUs.

Just as before, TDPs for U-Series processors will be set at 17W, while the more powerful M-Series SKUs will come with 35, 45 and 55W TDPs.

These chips will be used by laptop makers together with the Panther Point chips which will be available in four different versions dubbed the HM75, the HM76 and the HM77, with the UM77 being specifically designed for low power notebooks, according to VR-Zone.

Specs wise, the HM75, the HM76 are almost identical, except for the fact that the former lacks USB 3.0 support, while the HM77 will add RAID and Smart Response to the features list of the HM76.

As far as the low-power UM77 chipset is concerned, this is fairly similar to the HM77, but it comes with only four SATA ports instead of six (only one is SATA 6Gbps compliant), and it drops four PCI Express lanes and four USB 2.0 ports.

Moving to the CPUs in the Ivy Bridge series, these will feature similar specs with their current counterparts based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, but feature slightly higher clocks and the much-improved Intel HD 4000 built-in graphics core. Detailed specs are available in the tables included in the article.

Intel plans to release these 3000M series processors in at least two stages with the quad-core parts coming out in April 2012, while the dual-core Core i7 and Core i5 chips will arrive in May of the same year.

Sadly, there’s no mention of when the Core i3 parts arrive on the market, so those of you hoping to buy a cheap Ivy Bridge notebook in 2012 will most probably have to wait for Q3 to find such a device.

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