It turns out that the unconditional death of some Ivy Bridge parts will start earlier than we expected. Intel has issued its famous PDN, Product Discontinuance Notice, that sends processors to meet the maker for the first Ivy parts.
It turns out that such a notice has already been issued for Core i5 3450 and it has been issues in Q4 2012, so pretty much now. The PDN gets issued some two months before the EOL, or End of Life status that is the inevitable end of a processor lifecycle.
Core i5 3450 was launched in Q2 2012 and will have a one-year lifespan, much shorter than usual, but it turns out that Intel has smoothing much better in Q2 2013 to replace this 3.1 to 3.5GHz quad-core with four threads and 6MB cache.
The ageing Ivy part has a TDP of 77W and a little birdie tells us that we can expect more under the same thermal envelope for future desktop Haswell parts.
A few other processors, such as previous generation Sandy Bridge based Core i5 2600S, 2500, 2500S, 2500T, 2400S as well as Core i5 2310, 2320 and 2405P, are getting the PDN notice with the EOL planned for Q2 2013.
Intel is definitely preparing for the Haswell revolution and it’s planning an aggressive transition.