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RIP Pentium II, 1997 - 2006
zorn writes "The Register has the scoop that 'this week Intel told its customers that it is to formally discontinue production of the Pentium II at 266, 333, 366 and 466MHz. Documentation seen by The Register reveals that you'll be able to continue ordering the part for a year, with the last trays leaving the chip giant's Pentium II warehouse on 1 June 2006.'"
Article states that many embedded systems still prefer to use it because of heat/power requirements.
Old CPUs popular for embedded systems and the like are always made forever - their application might not need something fast and hot, the hardware might not support something new and fancy, and there might be certification issues when making a major part change.
from the still-waiting-on-my-sexium dept.
"Pent" is based on the Greek prefix, which include "tetra", "penta", "hexa", and "hepta". "Sex" is from Latin, which include "quad(ri)" "quint" (or "quinque"), "sexa" and "septa".
So, the logical next step after Pentium would be Hexium, not Sexium.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
People still by 486 processors and higher for (relatively) heavy-weight embedded systems. Old design processors are far more forgiving of nasty environments (heat, cold, humidity, dust, vibration) than new top-of-the-line ones.
The difference between Intel and AMD is that Intel has been successfull (or unfortunate depending on the point of view) to secure military and government contracts for its CPUs. Some of these contracts require at least 7 years worth of part availability for any component (some even more).
In the past Intel has been successful in moving the technology for its old CPUs to licensees and relieving itself from the burden of maintaining manufacturing facilities. For example the 80286 lifetime during the last years of the contracts was fulfilled by Harris which managed to convince the military that their parts are acceptable replacement despite them using a different semiconductor technology.
There are no full licensees for anything after i486 this is no longer the case and Intel has to ship all of the CPUs themselves. And methinks that with all the developments in CPUS even the circa 2K$ which people like US Gov pay for a Pentium 2 keeping the facilities makes it not worthwhile.
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A P3 KATMAI is basically a process shrink of the P2, with SSE (and that damn Processor Serial Number) added. However, Coppermine and Tualatin ARE different.
That said, there's not much difference between the Pentium Pro, the P2, and ANY of the P3 cores. The P-M is the first P6 (read: Pentium Pro-based) chip to have a design that's got more than small tweaks here and there.
In addition to the heavier embedded systems, the PII is somewhat popular for people who want to build inexpensive dual-processor machines and/or clusters. Yes, you can get much better performance out of the higher end chips, but you will be paying much more as well. Indeed, even the single-processor PIIs are fast enough for a minimalist desktop or linux box. Until this year, I used my own 300 MHz box for just about everything one does on a business desktop (I don't game & did send my processor-intensive stuff to a more capable beast). Finally, I do know others who have equipment or software that only runs on their legacy machines who would like spare parts or would like to replace the processor to the fastest of the same architecture available.
The PII certainly can't be hanging on this long for power-consumption reasons. For one thing, PIIIs were much more power-thrifty. In fact, some of the PIIIs were the lowest power processors since Intel made 486s...
PIII-500E 13.2W
Cel-533A 11.2W
PIII-933 11.61W
Compare that to the fastest PII:
PII-450 27.1W
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That the part has held on for so long, past the introduction of the Pentium III and the P4, is a sign of its appeal to manufacturers of embedded systems for which high clock speeds and commensurately high power consumption and heat dissipation figures are a problem.
It does imply that embedded system manufacturers choose PII over PIII for better power efficiency and less heat generated.
However, it is not a fact. PII simply generates more heat than same frequency PIII and is slower of course. That is partly because of PII's higher core voltage. Each time Intel or AMD introduces new CPU cores, they tend to lower the core voltage in respect to the predecessors, a result of shrinking the transistor size. Without achiving this, they wouldn't be able to put more transistors on the die or avoid the generated heat from burning the core.
I have once put a PIII 450MHz into my old PII box to replace the 233MHz CPU. Since the mobo doesn't support 100MHz FSB, the PIII is runing at 300MHz with a 66MHz FSB. It used to require a fan to cool the PII. Now I can simply use only heat sink to cool it passively. Needless to say, I'm quite happy with it.
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