Intel officially announced that they decided not to discontinue their Pentium III 600E (FC-PGA) for an indefinitely long while.
Just in case you don’t remember the whole story, we will briefly remind you. Last August Intel announced that they were starting the Pentium III 600E discontinue program. The shipments were to be stopped on 18 February 2001. however, today the company told that they had changed their mind and that they would keep shipping these processors. Moreover, they promised to provide these CPUs with a new D0 core stepping just like the elder models.
Tomorrow (2 February) the first samples with the new core will be available for testing. All the research should be over before 20 February and starting from 1 May, should begin the mass shipments of S-Spec Pentium III 600E with a new D0 core – SL5BT.
We would like to stress once again that this announcement is valid only for FC-PGA Pentium III 600E. The changed won’t touch upon those CPUs in SECC2 form-factor.
By the way, the future of Pentium III 667MHz is still very vague and unclear. This CPU isn’t included into the list of those lucky ones, which will get a new core (there are only the processors with clock frequencies lying in between 700MHz and 1GHz). However, the discontinuing hasn’t been announced either. As for Pentium III 650MHz, which was initially supposed to be discontinued together with Pentium III 600E, Intel seems to be keeping its promise about it and on 18 February the last shipment will bring the story for this processor to an end.