New Core i5-2435M and Core i7-2675QM CPUs spotted on Intel website

In the past month, we reported on several quad-core and dual-core mobile Intel microprocessors, planned to launch in September. We recently found two new Sandy Bridge mobile processors, that could be launched at the same time frame. Core i5-2435M and Core i7-2675QM were spotted on many chipset pages on Intel website, for example, in a note at the bottom of this page. Based on processor numbers, we suspect that these SKUs are similar to soon to be released Core i5-2430M and Core i7-2670QM, but have higher clocked HD 3000 graphics processing unit. Dual-core Intel i5-2435M should have 2.4 GHz stock and 3 GHz Turbo Boost clock speeds, and 3 MB last level cache. The i7-2675QM has 4 CPU cores and 6 MB L3 cache. The microprocessor should be clocked at 2.2 GHz frequency, that can be boosted to 3.1 GHz when only one core is active. It's very likely that both chips are manufactured in a BGA package.

Discovery of these two models brings the total number of mobile processors, expected to launch in September, to 9. That includes Core i7-2640M, i7-2670QM, i7-2675QM, i7-2760QM, i7-2860QM, Core i7 Extreme 2960XM, Core i5-2430M and i5-2435M, and Celeron B840.

There is another interesting tidbit of information on the page, that we linked above. The note on the bottom of the page states that a processor configuration update can enable AES instructions on Core i5 and Core i7 chips, that were claimed not to support this feature before. Apparently, AES instructions are not permanently fused off, and a new BIOS update can "unlock" them. Makes one wonder whether similar update can be used to unlock AES instructions on cheaper Sandy Bridge processors, and what other CPU features can be potentially unlocked on the latest Intel microprocessors via a BIOS update.