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Intel Breathes New Life Into Pentium
angry tapir writes "Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers. The dual-core processor operates at a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has 3MB of cache. Like many server chips, the Pentium 350 lacks features such as integrated graphics, which are on most of Intel's laptop and desktop processors."
A chip like this would work good for servers that are limited more by network bandwidth and disk IO than by CPU load.
... What exactly does this have to do with the older pentium architechtures?
Until Intel brings back the Pentium brand in general.
Unless they're stupid.
I'll never understand why they killed their most visible, most recognised brand.
Desktops don't have ECC. This does. Two cores with hyperthreading and ECC, only drawing 15W, isn't such a bad idea for the lowest of low-end servers.
it was a 59.97, actually...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
And this is also nothing new. They've been selling "Pentiums" for some time now. The Pentium G6950 is one for the last generation Core i series systems (LGA1156). The Pentium G600 and G800 series are for this generation core i series (LGA1155, Sandy Bridge). They are the same architecture as the i series chips, just more cut down.
So for example with the current LGA1155 offerings:
-- The i7-2600/2700 are the quad core, hyperthreaded chips with 8MB cache.
-- The i5s are quad core, non-HT, 6MB cache.
-- The i3s are dual core, hyperthreaded, 3MB cache. They also lack AES-NI instructions.
-- The Pentiums are dual core, non-HT, 3MB cache and have slower graphics and clockspeed. They also lack AVX instructions (and AES-NI).
-- The Celerons are even slower, and 2 or 1MB of cache, and the lowest end one is single core.
In all cases they are all Sandy Bridge. They are 32nm chips with that core architecture. The lower end ones just have less features, cache, clockspeed, and so on and thus can be made cheaper.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
What this looks perfect for is a NAS... now if only anyone would release a mITX C202/C204 board with 6 SATA ports on it.
Hmmm... processors do do more work per clock nowadays as compared to 12 years ago. And, they do it at waaaaaaaay less power and cost. Think about your huge many-fanned nearly 1kW rig from the turn of the millennium vs. the cramped space of a 1U slot pulling maybe 100W. This ain't your father's Pentium.
Program Intellivision!
HP Microservers sold like hotcakes, and were based around AMD's Athlon II Neo N36L processor - which is 64bit, dual core, 25W TDP, VT-x etc. No doubt Intel want part of this pie
Depending on the company, this would even be fine for an ESXi host to run 5-6 VMs on, given enough ram. As any ESX admin will tell you, you'll run out of IO and memory LONG before you get anywhere near running out of CPU these days, for all but the most cpu-demanding tasks (like VDI, code breaking, rendering, etc).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A mate had a bugged P90 that he got cheap. For 99.9% of users, there was no issue. It certainly made for a cheap machine that kicked arse at quake, back when he got it for about the price of a 486.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In other words you had a waffle iron and a 266.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Desktops don't have ECC. This does.
Really? Because even a low end AMD motherboard supports (certainly the 40GBP range ASUS ones do) ECC. It's very hard to find such a low-clocked processor as the 1.8GHz Pentium 350, but processors don't put out all that much heat if you don't use them much. It's also a motherboard which allows for easy underclocking, should you wish to reduce the power draw.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here and here, for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
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Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos. With OpenCL you could harness the built in Radeon GPU and at 18w for a dual core 1.6GHz part its a power sipper. You could slap 4 of them into a blade and only be using 72 watts for an 8 core with 4 Radeon GPUs you could run GP/GPU code on. Now that even Nvidia is supporting OpenCL it seems like that would be a better deal over the Pentium in TFA.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"Intel Desktops don't have ECC" FTFY
AMD desktops all support ECC and have for ages. When you figure in the cost of the board and Intel's price for the chip one could easily get get one of the low power Phenom variations and still have money in your pocket. One of the places i like to get chips from (great bunch to shop with BTW) has the AMD Phenom X4 9150e which is a 65w quad at 1.8GHz for $55. Slap it in a nice cheap business class board, I prefer the ECS business class myself, and you have a nice cheap server that will be quiet as a churchmouse while being cheaper and more powerful than the Intel Pentium dual.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.