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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
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.
For desktop use, yes, they are horribly slow by today's standards. But for simple embedded solutions, they can at times be considered overkill. Ex: When I get around to putting a mediapc under my drivers seat... I have no need or desire for a chip whose clock is measured in Ghz, simply because it's far more power (heat and draw) than I need to play mp3's and basic custom software.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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?
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
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I, for one, was saddened when the Arch Deluxe was discontinued.
Do you remember the story of NASA searching i8086 CPUs for their space shuttles just two years ago? There are other stories, I remember some companies paying a lot of money for ancient Toshiba 386 laptops that was the only computer certified to "remote control" a certian pacemaker. A re-certification of a new system would have cost much more than buying a few 386 laptops at pentium-class prices.
Some systems (not only NASA shuttles) are designed around a randomly selected CPU, and they run with software that needs the exact behaviour and timing of that special CPU. Say hello to the world of embedded systems.
This message from intel is just a warning for designers of embedded systems that there will be a day when there is no spare P-II left.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
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.
I agree... You can even do with less if you're just surfing. I'm posting this from a P-II 400Mhz that is used as a dial-up test machine at work. It has only 128Meg RAM and runs Firefox just fine on WinXP Pro (all visual effects disabled). The Task Manager indicates 170MB used, which means that it would run waaaay better with much more RAM, but it's good enough to do the testing of our webapp (and gives us some humility towards our customers with less snappy machines)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
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.
Betamax is the consumer version, and is pretty much dead. The professional version, Betacam SP, is still used, and in some places, it is still the most popular video format. The main reason is that it works well, the Sony Beta decks will not die, the newer professional digital decks are really expensive.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
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
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
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.
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.