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A month ago, we posted information that Intel was planning to release up to seven new processors based off the new Sandy Bridge microarchitecture sometime in May this year, and that one of these processors would be marketed under the Pentium brand. Well, guess what: screenshots of what appears an evaluation model of that Pentium CPU have been spotted in China.

Do you remember the news we posted about some time back in February this year, where Intel was reportedly planning to release a bunch of processors based off the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture in March? Well, if you did, you would have realized that one of the processors mentioned in that article was supposed to be marketed under the budget 'Pentium' brand, and that the Sandy Bridge version of this processor will be known as the Pentium G840.

That being said, it appears that evaluation samples of the Pentium G840 have started making their way around the world, for a Chinese IT website known as Inpai has reportedly got its hands on one such evaluation sample, and have posted both a photograph of the chip and a CPU-Z screenshot about its specifications on its webpage, as shown below.

Inpai also claims on its webpage that, based on the specifications found on the Pentium G840, the former is technically identical to its Core i3 sibling, the i3-2100. The only difference between the G840 and the i3-2100 is that Intel merely dropped the clock speed on the latter and disabled Hyper-Threading to produce the specifications found in the former.

As this screenshot contains information about a pre-release version of Intel's CPU, we'd strongly encourage readers to exercise discretion and regard the aforementioned information with a pinch of salt. Still, if Inpai is correct, it would seem that Intel is taking easy way out with its budget-level chips once again: by intentionally disabling certain features on its mainstream processors.

Source: Inpai