This should come as no surprise to anyone who has a vague idea of the tech world's calendar, but Intel has officially confirmed that its next-generation Sandy Bridge CPUs will get their grand debut at CES 2011.
It was common knowledge that processors and systems based on the new architecture would be available in early 2011, so it was fairly safe to say that we'd be seeing plenty of them at the trade show in January. Now that invites have been sent out, we know for certain that the company will be ushering in the new products at its January 5 keynote presentation.
There aren't a lot of details about what the presentation will hold, but it's been noted that Intel Vice President Mooly Eden will be on hand to launch the "world's fastest processor". Anything else would just be conjecture, but we're sure that the company will have a few surprise announcements in store.
While plans for the 'second generation Core' CPUs are moving along nicely, it looks like Intel is also making progress on retiring its older chips. We heard that the chip-giant was looking to transfer over to newer chips pretty rapidly and according to Digitimes the company is already getting started. Apparently, 21 45nm processors are in the process of being discontinued, bringing them into end-of-life sometime early next year.
The majority of the chips belong to the Core 2 family, including some quad-core Q9000 and dual-core E8000 and E7000 models as well as a number of Celeron and Pentium CPUs. There are a few newer processors in the mix too - the Core i7 975 EE and Core i5 750 are both scheduled for retirement in the first and third quarters of 2011, respectively.
With Sandy Bridge on the way, there won't be much call for these processors - especially the Core 2 models - but if you're looking to squeeze some extra life out of your older platform with a CPU upgrade, you might want to grab one while you still can.
