Back in June, Intel took the opportunity to share with the industry its focused approach to the naming scheme it will give its Core series processor lineup. Since its inception in the summer of 2006, the Intel Core brand lineup has progressed across several architectures and naming mechanisms all beginning with the same prefix.
Recently, Intel stated that its next generation socket LGA 1366 Bloomfield and LGA 1156 Lynnfield chips would be branded from high-end to entry-level as Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3 respectively. The high-end Core i7 branded chips will share sockets LGA 1366 for the Bloomfield quad-core 8-thread chips and LGA 1156 for the Lynnfield quad-core 8-thread chips. Core i7 Bloomfield chips launched in November use the Core i7 9xx modifier, while Core i7 Lynnfield chips will use the Core i7 8xx modifier.
The Core i5 performance-level brand will share both Lynnfield quad-core 4-thread chips and Clarkdale dual-core 4-thread chips that are yet to be announced. The entire brand will be operating on socket LGA 1156. As for the Core i3 entry-level brand, it will consist of all Clarkdale dual-core 4-thread chips that are yet to be announced. Finally, at the very bottom will be Pentium branded Clarkdale dual-core 2-thread chips running on LGA 1156 that are yet to be announced.
As for the bigger news, there will be three first upcoming LGA 1156 Lynnfield Core i7 and Core i5 desktop SKUs which are yet to be publicly announced by Intel. Sources at PC Watch in Japan state that they will be Core i7 870 2.93GHz, Core i7 860 2.80GHz, and Core i5 750 2.66GHz. All three models operate at a 95w TDP while Core i7 870 and 860 are quad-core 8-thread chips while Core i5 750 is a quad-core 4-thread chip respectively. As expected, the Core i5 version of Lynnfield does not support Simultaneous MultiThreading, and therefore it’s just a 4-thread CPU.
Back in January, we wrote that Intel was also planning to introduce low-power 65w TDP models of the Core i5 Lynnfield processors. This is still true, however, Intel has changed the TDP spec to 82w and plans to make low-power Core i7 chips as well. The first two models will launch in Q1 2010 and will be known as Core i7 860S 2.53GHz and Core i7 750S 2.4GHz.
