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.'"

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[klui]

Article states that many embedded systems still prefer to use it because of heat/power requirements.

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[bonzoesc]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Does anyone know...

[pavon]

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.

Original Press Release

[JaF893]

The original Press Release [intel.com] is still on the Intel website. Its hard to believe that this was cutting edge back in 1997.

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[arivanov]

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.

Re:Really warranted?

[bhtooefr]

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.

Re:change back to 80686 then?

[Gorath99]

So why not rename it 80666 ;)

I know it's a joke, but there's a reason why they won't go back to numbers (with or without biblical connotations). IIRC Intel tried to sue AMD for producing a chip they called a 486, but they were told by the judge that they couldn't trademark a number. That's why they called their next chip a Pentium instead of a 80586.

A few reasons to buy P2s

[Noksagt]

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.

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[bonzoesc]

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.

Re:Cute, but...

[captnitro]

The (rough) order is like this, not entirely chronological, but you get a feel for the scheme:

4004
4040
8008
8080
8085
8086
80186
80188
80286
80386
80486
Pentium
Pentium Pro
Pentium II ...

If you're wondering why we're still using a line of naming from 1971, just think about how Intel makes chips -- just add voltage!

Re:Pentium II? Heh, try the 8088

[bhtooefr]

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).

Re:One may ask, why?

[jensend]

The PII was designed for processes (.35 and .25 if I remember correctly) which Intel has since (for good reasons) scrapped. With the troubles with .09 and smaller processes, the .13 process may last a good bit longer, and so the P3 Tualatin may last a good long time.

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Certainly not power issues...

[evilviper]

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

Re:Really warranted?

[fimbulvetr]

The PIII has MMX2, which is one of the only significant differences between the 450Mhz PIII(Katmai) and the 450Mhz PII(Deschutes).
Of course, there are other differences, but none significant enough to touch on.
Use wcpuid if you have windows, or 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' in linux.

Misinformation!!!

[lxt518052]

From the article:
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.

Re:Pentium II was still available for purchase?

[Afrosheen]

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.

Re:Cute, but...

[hawkeyeMI]

that, and the chips ran at 666.66 MHz, so if you want whole numbers it properly rounds to 667. You didn't see this with 333 MHz because it's 333.33, which rounds down.