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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.'"
Computer prices don't follow rational pricing. You would think if you could buy a P4 2GHz for 75 bucks that a P2 333MHz would be like, 5 bucks, if that. But chances are it's probably $35, if not more.
Why in the Lord's name would you buy such outdated crap at such a high price? Reminds me of my first PC when the HDD drive died. It was 1 gig back in the days when BIOS limitations on the board would allow about 1.8 gigs, I believe. At the time, I couldn't even FIND a 1 gig HDD in retailers. I looked online, and the 1 gig HDDs were about 20% more expensive than the 6 gigs they had out.
We bought a new PC shortly there after.
Let's weed out the technological throwbacks, alright?
Marketers find that more than five generations in series can make your product seem stale (especially if it is really getting stale). So there is often a name/numbering change.
I considered the original Pentium to be like a x576, the PII a x686, PIV a x886, then lost count.
It's still being sold as an Intel Embedded Legacy processor, along with the 186 (which was really only used in embedded environments) and the 386. In fact, you can buy a whole wafer of any of their embedded legacy chips if you want to do your own packaging.
Article states that many embedded systems still prefer to use it because of heat/power requirements.
Yep.. I can attest to that. I have a 400 Pentium II Dell Dimension that was shipped with only a heat sink. No fans on the CPU whatsover. It's quiet as can be. I use it for squid, mail, webserver, file server, you name it. Wow.. I guess it will be 7 years old in a few months.
I don't know how they can claim it's discontinued if it never existed in the first place...
the P2 switched to 100Mhz FSB at 350Mhz, thus a P2 366 and 466 never existed. Since those are for embedded, they might be talking about mobile P2 - 366 mobile P2 indeed exists, but a mobile P2 466 does not (fastest P2 ever was 450Mhz, fastest mobile 400 Mhz).
And btw, the register gets it wrong: that it is available so long has nothing to do with power consumption and the like, it's simply because certain industry applications require that a chip is available for a long time - embedded chips are still in use after 20 years or so, and it's good if you can still get replacement parts.
We use Pentium 2s on some of our embedded systems, but by the time 2006 rolls around we'll be done using them.
Our newer embedded systems use Pentium 3s.
Actually, some of our basic systems (that we ship on a regular basis) still use plain old Pentiums running @ 200MHz. The processor is basically permanently attached to the board it comes on. It's amazing how small of heatsink it requires.
Remember hand-configuring your config.sys and autoexec.bat to free up more expanded (or was it extended?) memory to play X-Wing, and then your dang Ad-lib soundcard would start working....sigh....the good old days.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
For normal garden variety desktop office type usage. With W2K and 288MB RAM I see no reason to ever get rid of it.
I also have a P2-350 that runs absolutely fine for a single peripheral and application, a digital drawing tablet and image scanning. And with an even older W92OSR2 and only a 160MB RAM there is probably no reason to ever change it. When the peripherals fail and I have to replace them with devices that are not supported by the OS I be forced to but that will require only another 100-200MB RAM and an installation of W2K.
I think this almost biological urge to constantly upgrade CPU power is like a sickness.
I am the proud owner of 3 Pentium II based systems. I still use all of them on a regular basis.
:-)
Gateway Solo 9100 (PII-266) running Fedora Core 3
Back in 1998, this was the ultimate laptop. My college roommate spent a small fortune on his. I got mine from e-bay in 2001. I was working on this laptop when I first heard about 9/11. It's taken a beating, the battery is toast, and the DVD-decoder and video-in features are useless in anything but Windows 98, but it's still chugging along. 320MB RAM helps.
Dell Inspiron 3200 (PII-266) running Win2k Pro.
Free from company surplus with a good battery! Unfortunately, it can only do 16 bit color on the 1024x768 display. It's still good for basic office uses and web browsing/e-mail, especially with a wireless card.
Also, the first generation PII-Mobile processors really cut down on our home heating bill
Gateway G6-300 (PII-300 upgraded to PII-350) running Fedora Core 3
I bought this cheap from my roommate who said it "only ran Linux". (I much later found out that the processor was defective, which caused 3D video acceleration to be FOOBAR. Since the Riva 128 video card wasn't DRI supported, Linux worked great) The defective processor was replaced with a good PII-350 when a friend upgraded to a PIII. It is still a great fileserver.
With enough RAM and the right OS, PII systems can do most of what most people use a computer for. They are still great for the web and for office uses, but are lacking for more processor intensive application.
So to all you PII fans out there, keep on partying like it's 1999!
But that's just not true... I explained this in good detail.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've got PIX firewalls built around socket 370 Celeron variants of the Pentium II. The slowest of these PIX firewalls can handle 100 times the amount of internet traffic we could ever think about affording.
Recently Cisco moved to a 133 MHz AMD cpu in their PIX 501. Their higher end PIXes use Socket 370 Celeron and Pentium III chips.
-ted
I call bullshit: I just decommed my last P-II 266.
Left alone and under no load, it would run close to 100C. It was goddamn hotplate.
By the end, I was using two 80mm fans blowing on the heatsink and a third one sucking the air out the back. The hot air coming out the back was enough to heat the room it was in. I would have put water cooling on it IF I could have found a PII water kit.
But it was cheaper to just trash the thing. Replaced it with an Athlon 64 system that runs MUCH cooler and much quicker.
The McDonald's Arch Deluxe: a product before its time.
Try here to make your own.
PPro (6th-generation, OOOE, Register renaming, fully pipelined ALUs/FPU, etc. .5 micron, 120-200 MHz) ->
.35 micron shrink, 233-300MHz) ->
PII Klamath (Added MMX, better 16-bit performance, external cache,
PII Deschutes (.25 micron process shrink, added official 100MHz FSB, basis for Celerons, 300-450MHz) ->
PIII Katmai (.25 micron optimization, added SSE, introduced official 133MHz FSB 450-650MHz) ->
PIII Coppermine (.18 micron shrink, added on-die 256K cache on 256-bit bus, 500-1133 MHz) ->
PIII Tualatin (.13 micron shrink, bumped cache to 512K, used new incompatible bus protocol, 600-1400 MHz)
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
These PIIs all have a FSB of 66MHz. They are the first generation PII. Then Intel introduced 100MHz FSB and used them first on newer PIIs which run at 350, 400, 450MHz. They made some improvements over PII senior's terrible heat/power consumption issues. So your example doesn't fit very much into the case here.
The article is simly wrong about PII's power consumption.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As someone who is browsing this article on a PII 266, I take offense at this comment. Haha. This computer has served me well, for the most part...can't beat $50 on eBay when it comes to a machine that's just used for mostly email and web browsing at college.
I remember reading somewhere (probably /.) that had Intel not stolen technologies from AMD, the 486 would have required raised-floor cooling systems.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
No, its called people with taste. A retard would go to GAP and pay 50 bucks for a T-shirt witch a giant gab logo all over it, when they could get the same shirt without the GAP logo for 10 bucks at a differant store.
If you haven't noticed, the more highquality a product is, the less logo and badging it has on it. Simply because not slapping your logo all over things is part of quality. People will pay to not be some big tacky billboard for a product. If I'm making a purchase of a large price, i don't care how good something is if it looks like a turd, I'm not buying it. Why do you think apple can sell a monitor with same panel in it as other companies use who sell it for less? Simple, taste, they make it clean looking, and that sells.
Similar effect with cars, ever notice that cheap cars look ugly compaired to expensive cars, but the reality is it cost the same to make a car look beautiful as it does to make one look ugly, all the shape of the parts. And the more expensive ones do their looks with less.
Oh how about computer cases, look at Lian Li cases, they really arn't that great ( I own one, it's pretty sucky). But people will buy them anyways cause it's how you get a clean looking case. All I wanted was a cheap clean small box, but they don't exist, if you go cheap you get a over styled POS. To get a simple box you have to pay more.
This is the reality of the world. And as long as people like you decide to go for saving a few bucks to become a billboard for products, the world will be stuck in a rut of massive marketing in every freaking corner.