Intel mobile Pentium B940 and B950 CPUs coming soon

Since introduction of the first Sandy Bridge microprocessors from Core i5 and i7 families in January 2011, Intel released Sandy Bridge parts for most of its mobile families, but Pentium. Recently, Hewlett Packard updated specifications of HP 431 and HP 630 business laptops, revealing two forthcoming Pentium processors, B940 and B950.

Pentium dual-core B940 and B950 CPUs will operate at 2 and 2.1 GHz respectively, and, similar to mobile Celerons, will have 2 MB shared L3 cache. The chips will be compatible with socket G2. Other processor specifications are unknown at this time. Pentium CPUs are supposed to fill a gap between low budget Celeron chips, and middle-class Core i3 parts. As such, they should share many basic features of both Celerons and Core i3s, including support for SSE4 and 35 Watt maximum power consumption. Seeing that the mobile Celeron B810 was crippled beyond recognition, we believe that the Intel B940 and B950 chips will have more features left enabled. Hopefully, the Pentiums will include Virtualization technology, that was disabled on Arrandale Pentium microprocessors. Launch date of new models is not known yet, although we suspect that it may coincide with the launch of desktop Pentium Sandy Bridge CPUs.