Intel May Scrap Havendale

A new leak indicates that Intel may be abandoning at least early plans for its first mainstream processors to include built-in graphics. Versions of the company's Auburndale and Havendale desktop and notebook processors with graphics cores on the chips themselves have reportedly been shelved due to economic concerns. As Intel can less afford to keep plants making 45 nanometer processors, the company allegedly hopes to shut down sooner by focusing only on 45nm Core 2 and Pentium parts for the low end and Core i7 for the high end.

In exchange, Intel is thought to be advancing the launch of Arandale, a more advanced 32nm chip originally slated for summer 2010 but now ready as early as the start of the year; the "highly positioned" sources behind the leak claim it may be introduced in March. Few things are known about Arandale beyond the reduced footprint from the smaller manufacturing process and the room it affords for a likely larger L3 cache.

Previous reports have supported rumors of a delay and have pushed at least this version of Havendale to January.

Auburndale and Havendale are still expected to show in stand-alone, CPU-only versions and will be mobile and budget desktop versions of Core i7 that switch to the new, point-to-point QuickPath interfance between the processor and peripherals, eliminating the need for a traditional system bus.

By Electronista Staff

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Intel, computers, Core 2, Pentium, Auburndale, Core i7, Havendale, Arandale