Intel has announced start of product discontinuance program for its Pentium III processor at 1.40GHz with 512KB L2 cache – the last and final Socket 370 chip ever. Discontinuance of the fastest Socket 370 chip means the formal end of the whole Socket 370 era started back in 1999 with the release of Intel Celeron 366MHz CPU.

The Pentium III 1.40GHz processors with 512KB of L2 and supporting 133MHz good-old FSB used to be quite popular among rational end-users for their excellent performance that was sometimes higher compared to the more expensive Intel Pentium 4 processors available in late 2001.

The last date to place orders for the Intel Pentium III 1.40GHz chips is the 7^th of November for both tray and boxed versions; the last shipment date is the 16^th of April, 2004 and the 15^th September 2006 for boxed and tray versions respectively. Certainly, no one will really order such products from Intel for new PCs and the dates are mostly for system integrators that may need to have the chips for replacement purposes.