It’s about time we got an interesting value processor to review from Intel. Today I’m bringing you
a full review of the most interesting dual-core Westmere for the desktop the Intel Core i3.
Priced at $113 (and selling for about $125 on the street) the 530 runs at 2.93GHz and features no
turbo modes. It’ll run at 1.33GHz at its lowest frequency, and no faster than 2.93GHz at full load.
The missing turbo boost is almost all you sacrifice as the 530 still has a hefty 4MB L3 cache shared
between both cores. Each core gets a 256KB 10-cycle L2, just like the i5s and i7s.
The un-core is clocked at 2.13GHz, down from 2.40GHz in the i5. That should hurt performance a bit
compared to our simulated i3 in the launch article. Aside from Turbo the other thing you give up with
the i3 is AES acceleration. Westmere's AES New Instructions (AES-NI) are disabled on all of the i3s in
typical Intel fashion. There has to be some reason for users to opt for a Core i5 instead.
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