Intel Graphics-Less Sandy Bridge CPUs Confirmed by Gigabyte

At the end of last year we found out that in the first quarter of 2012 Intel planned to release a trio of Sandy Bridge processors that would come with their built-in GPUs disabled. Now, almost a month after this initial report, Gigabyte has confirmed the existence of these chips.

The motherboard maker has just added these three processors to their CPU support list, where they were spotted by CPU-World.

As we revealed in the last days of 2011, the three chips are the Core i5-2380P, Core i5-2450P and a somewhat older acquaintance of ours, the Core i5-2550K.

With a base clock of 3.1GHz and a maximum Turbo Speed of 3.4GHz, the Core i5-2380P greatly resembles the Core i5-2400, sans the integrated GPU of course.

The Core i5-2450P on the other hand is a bit odd as both of its 3.2GHz base and 3.5GHz Turbo frequencies are 100MHz lower than those of the Core i5-2500.

Last but certainly not least, is the Core i5-2550K which, as we speculated at the beginning of December, has 100MHz higher base and Turbo frequencies than the current i5-2500K, which means that this will run at 3.4/3.8GHz.

All three models have 6MB cache, but none of them has VT-d or TXT support, a feature all previous non-K SKUs in the Core i5 family supported. Hyper-Threading won’t make it in the features list either, while the TDP should be set at 95W.

The launch date of the three new models is not yet known, but they are apparently scheduled to arrive in the first part of February.

The reason behind Intel’s decision to release these processors is not yet known, but we suspect that the chip maker is trying to get rid of some CPU dies that don’t have working on-board graphics.

Posted in: Hardware, News, Preview