Intel has just announced their latest lineup of Core i5 processors. Sandy Bridge, as the new architecture is called by engineers is Intel's new microarchitecture, following Nehalem. The new processors are produced on Intel's 32 nm production process which has reached maturity over the last few months. Unlike the last generation "Clarkdale" processor, Intel has integrated a quad-core CPU, graphics, cache, memory controller and PCI-Express connectivity into a single silicon die. Compared to a multi-chip module like on Clarkdale, this considerably reduces production cost and complexity.Let's talk about the processor core quickly. It is a quad core design, that features Hyper-Threading technology on some models, which effectively doubles the number of threads to eight. Intel has performed several changes to the architecture to improve performance and performance per Watt, you can the full details in our Sandy Bridge CPU reviews which will be published shortly.