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Intel launches Ivy Bridge Celeron and Pentium chips, signals total confidence at 22nm

Intel has stealthily updated its Celeron and Pentium products with new CPUs. The new chips aren't a big jump over the old ones, but they come with lower TDPs and a few price points below $50.
By Joel Hruska
IvyBridge-Wafers

Intel's high-end CPU upgrades and major tech initiatives get a lot of press but the company's low-end updates arguably impact a much larger number of people. Chipzilla has released a new series of Ivy Bridge processors to refresh the Celeron line as well as a new, lower-end Core i3.

The new Celeron chips are 55W parts with one 35W low-power variant. Speeds are generally identical to the old Celerons, but the comparison varies depending on the SKU -- the old Celeron G55 (32nm, 2.7GHz, $52) matches neatly against the new Celeron G1620 (22nm, 2.7GHz, $55). Both chips share the same amount of L3 cache (2MB), though TDP on the new parts is 10W lower than on the previous chips. Similarly, the new Pentium G2130 nudges clock speeds up 100Mhz compared to the G870, with a top-end clock of 3.2GHz instead of 3.1. TDP is 55W, compared to 65W, and the list price is $86, up from $75.

The new chips should feature somewhat improved graphics. Intel doesn't assign a moniker to these parts, save for "HD," but the GPU inside them is functionally identical to Core i3 processors with HD 2500 graphics. Unfortunately, that's still not going to be particularly good.

Finally, there's the new Core i3(Opens in a new window). The Core i3-3210 takes over from the Core i3-3220 as Intel's lowest Core-i3 CPU with a $117 price point. The extra $31 buys you Hyper-Threading and AVX support -- whether or not that's worth it will depend on what sort of work you plan on doing with the chip.

If you're curious how these low end updates tie into Intel's mainstream roadmap, here's the relevant document:

Haswell / Ivy Bridge roadmap

With the low-end products (not pictured here) converting to Ivy Bridge, 22nm will soon account for most of Intel's shipments. Sandy Bridge-E remains the premiere product family until Q3 2013, when the third-generation Ivy Bridge-E finally tips up. It'll actually be quite interesting to see how Ivy Bridge-E and Haswell break down; the next-generation architecture from Intel has a number of features that could give it a substantial leg up on even a six-core IVB part. There's no word yet on when Haswell-E will ship or whether or not it'll be compatible with the X79 LGA2011 motherboards that launched in late 2011. Based on Intel's past release histories, I'm guessing not. IVB-E may be drop-in compatible, but Haswell-E likely won't.

The bigger news here is that Intel's 22nm yields are good enough for the company to launch low-end products in volume across its full product line. Managing costs at the low end is vital to keeping margins high; Intel wouldn't  move Celeron and Pentium to 22nm until it knew it could do so profitably.

As for AMD, the new chips shouldn't have much impact on the beleagured manufacturer's ability to compete with Intel. The updates here are relatively small, and AMD's Trinity was aggressively positioned at launch last year.

Now read: Intel’s Haswell is an unprecedented threat to Nvidia, AMD

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Haswell Ivy Bridge-e Components AMD Pentium

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