Do the latest Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors just work?

Solution 1:

Yes, both the 2nd and 3rd generation (latest) i3/i5/i7 processors and built-in graphics will work out of the box in Ubuntu 12.04. The 2nd-gen usually have the suffix -2xxx and HD3000 graphics while 3rd have -3xxx and HD4000 graphics. e.g. i3-2310M is 2nd-gen i3, while i5-3520M is 3rd-gen i5.

However, many laptops also come with a second discrete (separate) graphics card from AMD/Nvidia (called hybrid graphics), and you will need to install the drivers for those for optimal performance. But it's an easy process, and can be done with two clicks from Settings...Additional Drivers.

Solution 2:

I tested a Second Generation Sandy Bridge (i7 2600) and a 3rd Generation Ivy Bridge (i7 3770T). In both cases they worked out of the box, like all Intel CPUs.

In the 12.04, which uses the 3.2 kernel, many performance improvements were backported from 3.3 back to 3.2 to use in 12.04. So both Sandy and Ivy should work nicely. There are even more enhancements for both architectures that we will find in the upcoming 12.10 which will benefit even more this type of hardware.

If you want to see if the CPU is correctly handled a simple command would be:

cat /proc/cpuinfo this will give you ALL the information about the CPU. Since it is a multi-core CPU, you will see a lot of information. Other ways are sudo lshw -c cpu and sudo dmidecode -t processor.