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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.'"
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 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Why in the Lord's name would you buy such outdated crap at such a high price?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?
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.
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.
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/
I, for one, was saddened when the Arch Deluxe was discontinued.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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
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
Parent is modded +1, Insightful.
Ah, Slashdot... your moderation is always a source of entertainment...
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(){}'
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.
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.
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
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
> 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.
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.
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.