Intel brings Ivy Bridge to budget processors

 

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By David Bayon

Posted on 22 Jan 2013 at 11:05

Intel has extended its 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture down as far as the low-end Celeron family, nine months after its launch.

Ivy Bridge has previously been rolled out to all Core processors and some Pentiums, but the update means budget systems with LGA 1155 motherboards will also be able to take advantage of its more efficient design.

A total of eight new chips have been introduced: three Celerons, four Pentiums and a new low-end Core i3.

The Celeron G1610 and G1620 are dual-core chips running at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz, with 2MB of L3 cache and integrated HD graphics, and they both have a TDP of 55W. A Celeron G1610T model drops the frequency to 2.3GHz for a TDP of 35W.

The Pentium range sees three full-power parts – a 2.8GHz G2010, 2.9GHz G2020 and 3.2GHz G2130 – all of which have two cores, 3MB of L3 cache and the same integrated graphics. Again, if the 55W TDP is too high, a 2.5GHz Pentium G2020T lowers it to 35W.

Finally, the one addition to the Core family is the 3.2GHz Core i3-3210, a dual-core chip with Hyper-Threading, 3MB of L3 cache and integrated HD 2500 graphics. Like the rest, its TDP is 55W.

The changes at the budget end of the line-up come as those more interested in high-end parts gear up for the launch of the next-generation Haswell architecture, expected this summer.