On Intel Pentium 4 Life Cycles

by Anton Shilov
11/28/2002 | 05:58 PM

This Japanese site revealed some unofficial details in regards life cycles of Intel Pentium 4 processors a couple of days ago. Since the information seems to be of great interest, I decided to share it with you, because after this is presented it will be much easier to fully understand the market trends as well as Intel’s policy.

I can point out a number of interesting facts about Intel’s strategy based on the table:

• Intel not only rapidly increases the core-speeds of its chips, but also pushes the processor bus frequencies up. As you may see, there will be no processors with core-speed below 2.80GHz by the end of the year and there will be only one Pentium 4 CPU with 533MHz QPB.
• There will be a very few Pentium 4 chips with 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus in the first quarter 2003.
• The real long-living CPU is the Pentium 4 2.53GHz, another chip to stay for a long time is the Pentium 4 3.06GHz.
• The Pentium 4 2.40GHz microprocessor seems to be a model made especially for hardware enthusiasts. With relatively low core frequency, this should be a rather interesting product in terms of price : performance ratio, as well as for overclocking.

See also: About Intel’s Transition to 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus.