It looks like Intel has new plans to continue the Pentium brand. A Pentium based on the new Sandy Bridge core is just around the corner and it will carry the G850 moniker.

You already saw the G840 dual core clocked at 2.8GHz with graphics at 850MHz and 3MB of memory but the new G850 is about 100MHz faster. The Pentium PG850 runs at 2.9 GHz and it packs two multithreaded cores as well as 850/1100MHz clocks for the graphics.

It supports dual channel memory and fits in Sandy Bridge socket 1155 boards, affected by the SATA bug or not.  Pentium P850, G840 and G620 branded Pentium CPUs will continue troughout 2011.