Intel Core i3-2310M Mobiler SR04R 2.10GHz 2 Kern 3MB L3 PGA988B

The Intel Core i3-2310M is a mid-range dual-core processor for notebooks that was introduced at the beginning of 2011. It offers two cores and can process 4 threads simultaneously thanks to hyperthreading. Compared to the i5 and i7 dual-core processors, the i3-2310M does not offer Turbo Boost for automatic overclocking of the processor (but for the integrated graphics card). VT-d, Trusted Execution and AES are also disabled (as with the i5-2410M).

Sandy Bridge is a further development of the Arrandale architecture. Apart from optimisations, the new 256-bit AVX instructions in the CPU part and the improved Turbo 2.0 are particularly worth mentioning. However, the i3-2310M only uses this for the graphics card. Furthermore, an improved Dual Channel DDR3 memory controller for max. 8 GB DDR-1333MHz is integrated directly in the processor.

The integrated DirectX 10-capable Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics card is located directly in the CPU and shares the level 3 / last level cache with it. Although this reduces the processor performance somewhat when graphics are activated, the graphics performance is significantly better than with the old Intel HD Graphics and on a par with an Nvidia Geforce 310M entry-level graphics card.  Thanks to Turbo Boost, it is clocked from 650MHz to 1100MHz.

Thanks to the improved architecture, the performance is slightly above that of a similarly clocked Arrandale CPU. On average, the Core i3 is therefore just below a Core i5-430M (2.3-2.5 GHz). The performance should thus be sufficient for most applications.

The Sandy Bridge dual-core processors also include the graphics card and the memory controller in the specified TDP of 35 watts. With 35W TDP, the processor is best suited for 14" notebooks and larger.