Intel Corp. announced product discontinuance plan for Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors, which essentially deletes NetBurst architecture processors from Intel’s mobile processor lineup.

“Market demand for the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processors 2.80GHz, 3.06GHz, 3.20GHz, 3.33GHz, and 3.46GHz on Intel Architecture based PC Applications has shifted to higher performance Intel processors,” Intel said in a statement. The last order date for the mentioned chips is August 19, 2005, whereas the last product discontinuance shipment date is October 20, 2006.

It is unclear which processors the company considers to be faster than the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors, as Intel Pentium M chips, while scoring really high in benchmarks, still do not provide performance that could be considered as much higher than the Pentium 4 products in all types of applications. Usually the Mobile Pentium 4 chips are used in the so-called desktop replacement notebooks (DTR) that demand extremely high performance. Some system builders, such as Dell, even used Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chips.

The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors come in mPGA478 packaging are designed for 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus infrastructure. The latest incarnation of the chips feature 1MB of L2 cache, Hyper-Threading as well as SSE3 technologies. The latest Mobile Pentium 4 processors feature power management Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology that enables lower thermals and provides more reliable system performance in a notebook.

Thermal Design Power (TDP) of the Mobile Pentium 4 processors is 88W, which is currently higher than that of the latest Intel Pentium 4 processors for desktops running at up to 3.40GHz clock-speeds and featuring EM64T, EIST, EDB and other modern technologies, which have TDP of about 84W, and also considerably higher than that of typical mobile processors that have TDP of about 25W. It is possible that because of that and a relatively small gap in performance difference between modern Mobile Intel Pentium 4 and Intel Pentium M processors the demand shifted from the former to the latter. It is also possible that Intel re-introduces a family of mobile NetBurst-based chips at a later date.