Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
In related news, global warming started to
decline, as temperatures in Oregon
returned to normal.
they are going to be cheaper or more expensive?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"Rest In Pentium"
That this made me a little sad?
That means I can't buy parts for my old HP Netserver??
mazevedo
I was really impressed when we first got our first 450Mhz, but god, does it seem like a dog now... I do remember thinking at the time, 1998 iirc, who the hell needs that much?!?
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.
naah, too easy.
/. article on Sony phasing out Betamax...
On a real note, how many PII's *DID* Intel produce in the past couple of years?
Gah, this was about as surprising to me as when that
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Why in the Lord's name would you buy such outdated crap at such a high price?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?
The author of TFA knows:
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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Does that mean AMD has won?
I don't need a signature.
I imagine large institutes with many of the same old p2 pc's that have older mobo's that can't support faster processors.
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.
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.
Seriously though, what about the 300 MHz P2? Or 400 for that matter? Were they both canned earlier? Intel hatin' on 100 MHz FSB P2s?
The Pentium 2 chip's light may be waning, but I still have two fileservers that will continue to defy Moore's Law.
I guess now could be the time to publish that book "101 Uses For An Obsolete Pentium 2 Chip". Bathroom tiles? Floor mosaic? Xmas ornaments?
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.
The original Press Release is still on the Intel website. Its hard to believe that this was cutting edge back in 1997.
They're formally not making any more PII's???
Are they still informally making PII's and I just missed it?
Or is this just like saying the 90's are officially over?
I'm confused.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Dammit, I was just going to buy a new Pentium II 266! Now I need to hurry.
Since those chips are made on an old process, is Intel going to upgrade the fab, close it, or manufacture something that can still make use of it. Licensing DMD from TI would be a nice replacement for the failed LCOS initiative and it doesn't require state of the art chip geometry. Not that I've ever heard of TI licensing that stuff.
It's not even 2005 yet!
I'm not dead yet!! Quit writing my obituary!
-Pentium II
This trend to move away from old technology such as the Pentium II that still serves a valid purpose is silly, part of a push to always be bigger and better.
Now I'm not saying that the Pentium II is viable for any new programmes, heck, I find my Pentium 4 a little slow at times. I first started questioning this push over the summer, when I worked at a Canadian government office. The workers there ALL had brand-new Pentium 4 Dells (and it wasn't just our office, the entire facility had been upgraded), with full sound cards, video, you name it. Of course, sound was all deactivated as it was a cubicle farm.
Needless to say, what did the people use these Pentium 4's for? Word Processing. Perhaps a bit of Excel, and some random surfing of the web. I wasn't complaining, because I was underworked and could take advantage of the Pentium 4's spectacular Solitaire and Minesweeper processing, but it wasn't necessary.
The Pentium II can run Office applications fine, and heck, that's waht the majority of work force productivity is? Now you'll have to buy a better model to use Word.. wow.
I don't know the cost difference in terms of productivity between the P2 and the P4, and I'm sure they can concentrate on just producting the P4 even more on masse, but this is simply going to give procurement departments an excuse to connive themselves better equipment.
Well, that devolved into a rant, but hopefully my point can still come across clear! Cheers.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The 8088 (the processor used in the original IBM PC) is still current production. (Not made by IBM but by others, remember second-sourcing? Seems like a quant concept today.)
My only experience with the PII in the last few years have been carting them off as waste!
I'm sure I could have had this market cornered if only I had saved them. And yes they worked, but typically the machines were economically totaled and did not warrant any use of funds for refurbishing.
Certainly not a bad product....back in it's day.
Doh! I still need to get a PII 450 to install into my dual 440GX board. I hope I will get one in time!
When paired properly with "obsolete" software, "obsolete" hardware works beautifully.
Yeah I use AMD now too, but I had a PII and I suspect a lot of folks on this board did.
But for a lot of people, the pentium 2 was the real start of PC's for EVERY person in America, not just the nerds and rich kids. It was the Model-T behind the IT boom.
Requiescat in pace
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
This was a great processor that still keeps ticking. I've got a PII 266Mhz machine running Slackware that I'm still using as a firewall, proxy server, file server, and game server. I'll take one of these solid well designed CPUs from back when they really knew how to make them anyday over stuff on the market now. RIP Pentium II, you will be missed.
On the 0th day, God created C
Anyway, I wonder if manufactures that have products that are designed around the P-II will start buying them up, creating a shortage. Will we see the price of unused and "reconditioned" P-IIs on Ebay soar?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
But if the application needs something slow and hot, what better choice than the Pentium II?
I remember it was a big deal when intel went from the 486 to Pentium. well they keep on milking the Pentium name 2,3,4. Why not the Octium or Nonium?
"brxref
250 or 350nm, I'm sure (depends on the core). They have to do some redesigning (not much, though, but it does cost money) to do a process shrink, so I don't think they'd bother.
I thought they used low-power, embedded ARM chips for these kind of applications?
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I'm sure there will still be plenty to be found in the used chip market and in older computers that nobody wants.
Speak for yourself. I just bought 2 for home computers. They work fine. Saved a lot of money, and got some serious Geek Karma (as opposed to going to Best Buy which costs serious Geek Karma).
I don't respond to AC's.
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 Compy Corporation has announced that they are restarting production of their Lappy 486 due to an unusual surge in popularity and demand.
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.
betamax is dead. Sort of. :P
Nothing else to see here, move along
In very small quantities, usually distributed for spare parts or industrial applications, would be my guess. I was surprised to see they are still in production. There's still a lot of P II machines out there, doing all that people ask of them. Dropping $1,000 for a new P IV system with all the bells and whistles may appeal to the single geek, but requires more forethought for someone living on a budget. Heck, my laptop is still only a P I machine.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Hell, there are still a heck of a lot of Z80's being made. Embedded systems. There are a lot of systems running x86 and that don't want fans and such moving parts that can break.
Sure Intel could continue to make P2 like Seagate could continue to make 500 MB hard disk drives or like Ford can continue to make Model-Ts. The problem is the profit returns on these are horrible due to a number of problems. Even at sub $10 Intel would be hard pressed to find buyers. Technology has marched on so trying to integrate a P2 or a 500 MB drive into a "modern" system is much harder than buying "modern" components.
In the end it is about the money. Intel doesn't see any more profit coming from selling the P2 and the market isn't exactly telling them otherwise. As the manufacturers for the support components stop their production there is little use to continue production.
will this change the price of beer?
Sometimes. They also use 68k chips too. But if you're familiar with PC architecture, you do have the option to go with what you know.
Can anyone explain why Intel do not produce 90nm versions of those chips? I would expect that the change in production method would further improve the power dissipation of these chips. Like said in the article, most of these chips are used for embedded systems and, as such, would benefit from reduced power consumption. BTW, the shuttle still uses a 386 processor. From what I understand, from a very helpful guide at JSC visitor center, is that the shuttle uses less than 50% of the CPU time of the 386 and it has about 256K (yes, K) of memory.
New applications mostly use newer chips like the ARM, but legacy applications (and new orders of legacy products) still use older processors.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I knew him well. It replaced my Intel Pentium running at 100MHz. He stood tall at a massive 350MHz. He ran with the games I played the most, even the Legendary Final Fantasy 7 for the PC, of course with the asstance of Mr. Voodoo. Pentium II you will be missed. *trys to flush chip down toilet*
IBM never made the 8088 - back in the day, their fabs were used for mainframe chips.
Intel made the 8088. Harris, AMD, and NEC were second-sourcers (there were others). Yes, THAT AMD. AMD and Harris went on to second source the 286 (and got it to 20 and 25MHz, respectively - as opposed to Intel's 16MHz), and AMD fought Intel for the right to second source the 386 (Harris was sick of making Intel's chips, I guess) - after that, it was AMD (or NexGen) design (although before the K6, they used large portions of Intel's 386 design, which they were allowed to use).
I've a stack of p2-350 machines, each with 64 MB ram and 4GB scsi-1 hard drives. In their day (1998) they were pretty sweet workstations. In this day they are pretty nice machines running RedHat 7.0 or somesuch. They can be had at "junk shops" for less than US$50. Chuck in a monitor and some upgraded apps, etc, and you have a computer for children, libraries, and 80% of office workers.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
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!
In fact, you can buy a whole wafer of any of their embedded legacy chips if you want to do your own packaging.
Packaging, heck, I'd hang it on my wall! They don't even have to work!
Reminds me of my favorite geek object du art I've ever seen. Some PHB from years back actually had an IBM PC motherboard circuit board from back in the day. No parts, just the board. Way cool...
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.
What does an anecdote about a 7 year old desktop system have to do with the grandparent's point about modern embedded systems?
Why does his post have to address the grandparent post? Cannot it not address the parent post? Is this some sort of Slashdot rule you made up? Jeez.
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!
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
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Must've been around '90 or '91. It was a genuine IBM -XT type case, in the days when they were making them out dwarf star alloy.
It was at a customer's site and the only noticeable thing about it was that it had a cassette (as in the old Philips audio jobs) in one of the 5.25 drive bays as a back-up device.
I thought this was pretty cool in such an old box so I ran my totally legit copy of PC-Tools 4.24 to see what else it had with the sys-info page. And there it was, a 186 CPU.
I think it ran at 8.x MHz and had 512KB RAM. It was being used as an office machine and apart from a keyboard gunged up with enough organic matter to interest Friends Of The Earth, it was still going strong.
Ahhh, memories...
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
GM will soon discontinue all models based on wheels carved from solid blocks of stone. AT&T has begun phasing out its line of telegraph equipment in favor of more versatile communications technology. Bed Bath and Beyond will no longer carry Black & Decker's butter churns or bellows, and the US NIST Division of Weights and Measures has recommended that hogsheads, cubits, and ells no longer be used in official government documents.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
My first PC was a hand me down XT when my dad bought a 286. I was so happy to get that damn thing and my own 1200 baud modem. . .
Now I have a personal homogenous cluster of 14 PCs (x86 200MHz MMX) with a dual 166MHz setup as the head node. I realize this isn't fast but it was cheap and I can learn cluster computing on it quite nicely. My "normal" pc is an IBM T40.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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
If you want a slow, cheap processor, there are ones like the Via C3 out there that will do a much better job. The P2 isn't a good design, by today's standards. It's quite physically large, uses a lot of power compared to what it gets done, costs more due to outboard L2 cache, and uses a larger fabrication process than is common.
So if you are designing a low performance system today, there are just better choices. My first recommendation would be a P3 Coppermine. They are cheap, very small, and quite energy efficient in additon to having fairly good performance. If that's still too expensive or hot then the C3 is where to look. You can even go lower than that and get a National Semi/AMD Geode which is a 486-Pentium class processor that doesn't need even a passive heatsink.
It just gets to be time to retire designs after a certian amount of time, because it can just be done better/cheaper/faster/etc. As an extreme example, take old vaccuum tube computers. The later models were generally as powerful as a high-end programmable or low-end graphing calculators. While that level of performance is still useful for many applications, it's easy to see why the tube-mainframe design has been retired in favour of TI or HP calculators.
I have RIP running on my Pentium II for several years now.
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.
I've heard that the most expensive part of making chips is the factory. I understand that the factories are custom made for only that one chip that they make.
If that's true, why destroy the old factory? Why not build a new factory for the new chips?
I really got going on my parents' 486, and then got my own computer in 1995 when I was starting college. It was a Pentium 100 that cost almost $3,000. I ended up skipping the Pentium II generation completely because I kept that computer (overclocked to 133) going for the next 5 years until I graduated and got a full time job and was able to buy a P-III 600. That was still our fastest computer until just a few months ago, when I put together a computer from an Athlon 1GHz someone gave me. I do derive a sense of accomplishment from building decent computers with hardly any money into it.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
The real reason they called it Pentium is they could not trademark 486, 586, etc as a name. They were fighting AMD in court over this during the era of the 486, and lost, hence the next processor was the Pentium. Of course, most people would not be able to determine what greek value is next, hence the Pentium 2, Pentium 3, etc.
Indeed. One of my desktop machines here has a Pentium 2 350MHz in it, while my Dell laptop contains a mobile 366MHz chip. Also, the motherboard in the 350MHz box can only take Pentium 2 chips, up to 450MHz.
(It's nice to know that my two main PCs are now officially "old"! Maybe I'll upgrade in a couple of years...)
My daughter's ( 2 year old ) system is my old Celeron beige box...
Specs:
- Celeron 300A OC'd to 450 (100mhz FSB)
- geforce2 mx400 agp
- abit bh6 mobo
- 384 mb ram
- 12 gb HD
- 15" compaq monitor
It runs "Winnie the Pooh baby" and "Reader Rabbit" like stink...
If I had a spare sloket card and a Celeron 1000 FCPA chip, that puppy would be push 1.2 ghz. Keeping my eyes open...
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.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
I'll never forget you!
We'll always have ebay...
Dual PPro 200, and a dual PII Xeon.
I loves them both, but I can't keep 'em on, it gets too hot in here. -_-
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I am sure some people will advocate turning these PIIs into firewalls or whatnot. I have a couple PIIs at home, but didn't use them for my firewall. Why? Not necessary and too noisy. A firewall doesn't need the horsepower, and PIIs still have processor fans. I used an old Pentium for my firewall, as it doesn't need a cpu fan. It only has a heatsink on it. The only sound from the machine is from the power supply, which is very quiet.
But I have two PIIs that aren't doing anything, and I honestly don't know what to do with them. They aren't complete systems, so nobody really wants them as donations. I don't even think it is worth my time to auction them off on eBay. I also have a complete dual-Pentium mobo and gigantic 530W PS from a Compaq Proliant server.
Maybe in a year or two, I'll be able to build a complete mini-system inside those PII chips. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
He did mean the parent post, not the grandparent. Regardless, the comment was relevant because the anecdote in question cited the two points of low noise and heat, simply not in an embedded implementation.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
True, Pentium II chips are still overkill for some uses: simple web terminal, print server, file server, etc. There's nothing like a cheap/free computer to install Linux on, eh? That's what I'm doing right now: I have a Pentium MMX 200 computer that I'm planning to put Linux on and use it as an email/chatting/web-browsing computer.
There are still a lot of people, however, who are getting rid of their Pentium II computers and can't find anyone to buy them. There's just not a big demand for them anymore. That was just what I was referring to: there is still a demand, but it's much less than the supply.
Assuming that your PII even continued to run at 100C (which is at least 25 degrees above spec), it was still obviously misconfigured or defective. There is NO WAY that CPU should run over 60C, even with no heatsink. At 100C, you could throw water at the heatsink and it would dance like it was on a griddle. I would guess that you were accidentally overclocking it, perhaps by changing the FSB to 100. Perhaps you were overvolting it too. Even then, I'm amazed. All the money you spent on the fans and electricity to drive them should have been spent on a new CPU instead.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
huggles for dual sparcstation 20! Her SBUS is soo kyoot...
And did it come with the side-loading CD-ROM?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
>>the 186 (which was really only used in embedded environments)
Actually RM in the UK used 186s in their range of all purpose school computers. Cheaper than the 286s at the time, but couldn't run Windows.
I've noticed an interesting trend with AMD lately. They're phasing out their XP chips and trying to get everyone to go to AMD64. The less than stellar Sempron is priced where the XP's used to be, and the lower-powered 64's are priced where the higher end XP's are.
From an economic standpoint, they're encouraging you to buy an AMD64 chip for the same money a somewhat slower XP chip costs. If you want a cheaper XP-powered machine, you buy Sempron. I think they're going to stop building XP chips very soon.
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.
A couple of years ago I was looking at my brother in law's machine to see what I could do to upgrade it. It was a Gateway Pentium II system, or at least that's what it said on the case. When I opened it I saw that the processor had an FPGA form-factor. I had thought all PII's were slot 1. Also, when it booted the BIOS said it was running at 166Mhz.
So, was there really a 166Mhz FPGA Pentium II or did Gateway pull a fast one?
Katmai and Coppermine PIIIs are superior to the PII and are mostly backwards compatible electrically (but not socket-wise). Besides, the PII slot sucked, no one wants to use it now.
The earlier PIIIs are essentially the same CPU with an onboard cache, taking less power, while running a good deal faster. Oh, and they have more convienent packages, perfect for embedded systems and whatnot.
The PII doesn't have a market except for replacing existing parts in systems that were, at the time, cutting edge.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They were PRIMARILY used in embedded environments. I already said that there WERE 186 PCs (I know Tandy made one, too), just they weren't common.
Oh, and who said a pre-286 couldn't run Windows? 3.0 runs on an 8088...
http://www.wakachan.org/os/src/1102144707486.png
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
When discussing product loyalty, always remember that loyalty begins at home. Your first obligation is to protect your own interests. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I think they're going to stop building XP chips very soon.
According to a report I saw on Ars Technica, You may be right.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Behold the splendor.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
From an economic standpoint, it only makes sense.
High-end computing is coming in multicore now, AMD is going to need all that fab space churning out AMD64s, which performance-wise are better than the XP's.
I'm not at all surprised. It's what Intel would have done had Itanium been able to run 32 bit software as fast as it's Pentium-III, Pentium-IV offerings.
Then what am I going to put into my next workstation!?!
> Oh, and who said a pre-286 couldn't run Windows? 3.0 runs on an 8088...
:-)
Oh the Horror! One application at a time.
I remember no PII at 366 or 466Mhz. But there were PIIs at 350, 400 and 450MHz. Are those discontinued as well? There were Celerons at 366/400/433/466 though...
Not that I read the article...
I'm pretty sure Windows 3.0 could multitask on an 8088. I guess I'll have to fire up Virtual PC, find a copy of DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.0 online, and take it for a spin with "win /r", and then find some Windows 3.0 stuff that will use the processor (maybe find VB1.0, and whip up an app that says a number of iterations in a loop, then calculate the number of iterations in one second, and (with it in view, so I can see) switch to Program Manager). Basically, I need something that quite obviously changes constantly, and will run in Windows 3.0 Real Mode.
I'm still using one to run my website off of. An extremely old dell with a PII.
Would anyone enjoy some fine Intel collector's items?
Pentium II's on sale
And that article should read June of 2005.
Don't get me wrong, P2 systems still have plenty of uses, but I would never buy a P2 chip.
The P3-500 is a better, cooler, chip for only a few dollars more and is a drop-in replacement for a P2. Celerons are cheap and plentiful. You can get a much better chip for about the same price.
This is why 5x86's (actually just pimped-out 486's) are still being made, but the PII is on it's way out.
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 would say the 486DX was the start, not the Pentium 2. Maybe the original Pentium class.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I think you're thinking of multitasking made-for-Windows programs in real mode on pre-286 chips (which you could do even in windows 1.0 - but no window overlaps until 2.x), and the other gentleman is thinking of multitasking multiple non-Windows-(i.e., DOS-)programs. You couldn't multitask multiple DOS programs through Windows on any pre-286 chip.
Windows 3.0 multitasked at least as well (badly ?) as MacOS up until OS X :).
Well, the second member of the P6 family is nearing its end. You will still have to pry my Dual 1MB Pentium Pro's out of my cold dead fingers though. I will never give up that system for any thing! *tear*
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
...that I watched a friend play on his Commodore (rock on in 16 colors!) had two members of an away team exploring some abandoned computer room of the far future.
The line (printed on screen, of course, not recorded audio) was something like, "look at this ancient 801286, it's like a museum piece."
I, with my 8086 clone, was not amused.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This is so sad I am crying my eyes out. Intel will no longer make the worlds best processor besides the Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon, Athlon XP,...
Anyone who runs is V.C. Anyone who stands still is well-disciplined V.C.
Door Gunner, Full Metal Jacket
Wow. That's an impressive list.
Weird, imagining the most powerful CPUs available taking less than a watt of power, compared to a shiny new Pentium IV eating more than a hundred.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
They still make PIIs? Wow, you learn something new every day.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I used to run a fire breathing Pentium II monster. It had a Tyan Thunder 100 SMP motherboard with 2 Pentium-II 450's on it. That was a pretty nice system, while it wasn't all that fast (compared to my new Athlon-XP) it never slowed down much either. It had tons of cycles and it chugged away at a steady pace no matter what you threw at it. Unfortunately the motherboard kicked the bucket a couple years ago so I upgraded. It was a great system though.
Clickety Click
Hell, one of our embedded systems uses two 4MHz Z80s (no joke!). We have a newer replacement design that uses an AMD SC520 (486@133MHz), but we still manufacture and sell a few hundred of the Z80 based systems per year.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I actually had an 8086, which was kind of unusual back then. And it had EGA graphics! A full length card just covered with chips, lol.
Clickety Click
It had a primitive multitasker somewhat like DesqView, but not as good. If you loaded it on a 386 or better it could multitask better. I seem to remember some kind of "386 Enhanced" thingy in the control panel.
Clickety Click
My school had a network of RM Nimbus 80186 machines which could run MS Windows 1.0 with Pagemaker. Still got the copy I took somewhere...
A latent existence
The newer CPUs are necessary to run the latest spyware and exploits, which could really slow down an older PC.
The OP sounds like a snob. As if spyware doesn't slow down P4's or run on P2's, seriously. But yes, even if you're running "just office", a newer machine will still save you time. Compare how long it takes to launch Powerpoint or Excel on your old machine vs a new one. Or running queries in Access or working with large Powerpoint slides. Or using Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access at the same time.
Gah. How memories fade.
Windows 95, like mac OS 9 does not do real multitasking. It's all cooperative, requiring programs to voluntarily give up a slice of time. This of course works equally well on any cpu that runs windows, but faster on a 386 than a 286 or an 88
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
The Tandy 2000 used the 186 as well. It was even a much better machine than IBM PC. However like the Zenith Z-100 which was also better then the PC it was not compatable with the PC so they lost.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Intel gives a press release on 2 June, 2006, saying "Oops, we killed the Pentium III fab too, on accident."
There was the 386, and then, there was the 376. The 376 didnt have 16-bit parts, a different booting method, and was much simpler with the same performance as the other fatter one.Remove the silly protected mode and 16-bit silliness, and you have a lean, fast chip to which you could port Windows, and not feel bad about IBM not choosing the m68k for the PC.
Intel had a real chance there. They had already given out IP to cyrix, rise, amd, which would later compete and beat them. Restart life as 376, patented and all, and suddenly copying you becomes difficult again, and you hold all the IP.
I now wonder if the Athlon64 still has a hardware-implemented 16-bit protected mode to boot from. There must be a piece of 8086 somewhere on that huge chip, a piece we can really do without.
I think market forces will ensure that 20 years from now when we're booting the multicore,multicell quantum optical chip, somewhere deep inside an 8086 still lurks, with the complete instruction set, and Robert Browns DOS interrupt list (#21?), just to bring the monolith back to life, switch it to 32-bits, and a late-90s code to switch it to full 64-bits, and awaken the other cores/cells.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I know 586's are used on some NMS AG-Series T1/E1 PCI cards for Telecommunications network connections. AG 4040 boards
Lower end AG cards from NMS use 486's on PCI cards for Analog and Ditigal Telecommunication connections.
I agree.
I use a PII 333 for my mail server. No CPU fan, just a large heat sink. The thing runs in the low 50C range. The original poster either overclocked the hell out of the CPU or really botched the setup of the motherboard.
386 Enhanced basically allowed Virtual Memory and DOS multitasking (SUCKY DOS multitasking, but it was there).
I've owned nearly a dozen Pentium-II systems over the years (they just keep falling into my hands somehow), and I must say they seem to represent the height of PC stability and reliability. The Intel 440BX chipset has been rock-solid.
Motherboard designs around the time of the Pentium-II were at a fairly stable point in PC history. PCI and AGP were established, SDRAM modules were getting standardized and more affordable, and USB was getting ironed out. I've seen newer systems crash more often, as they seem to be made less robust (stricter thermal requirements, newer designs, mismatched components, and so on).
The Pentium-II CPU and Intel 440BX chipset seem to be a stable rock-solid combination, and this platform provides just enough speed to be useful for casual purposes (web browser, email, word processor, MP3 player, and so on). It makes an excellent "second PC" to have around the house as a spare. So, these systems should continue to be common and perform well for years to come!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Well, neither had I, but there they were, on the page the grandparent post referred to. The 386SX-16 used 0.75W typical, 1.1W peak. Technically, at no point was it the fastest chip Intel made (it was a budgetty chip made to be cheaper), and peak wattage was above 1.0W, but I still think it's damned impressive. Also, note the 486SX-25 (208 pin package), which used 0.82W typical, 1.04W max.
Is that what you were asking about?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca