Intel Discontinues 11 Processors Models

Intel has just announced that the company will discontinue 11 of its Celeron, Pentium, Core 2 Duo and Xeon processors based on older architectures in order to make room for chips based on new core designs.

To inform its partners of these changes, Intel has sent out product discontinuance notifications (PCN) throughout the day, which have stopped coming just now.

In total, these notifications included no less than 11 processors ranging from the Celeron 430, 440 and 450 Conroe-L based chips to the Xeon X3330 CPU that is built on top on top of the Yorkfield-6M architecture.

The vast majority of the chips that were discontinued however, are based on the Wolfdale and Wolfdale-3M core.

Even if these CPUs will be discontinued, Intel will still allow its partners to place orders until December 30, 2011, while the last product shipment date is set for June 8, 2012.

The only exception to this rule is the Celeron 440, which will be shipped “while supplies last”, as well as the three Xeon X3300, E3120 and E3110 processors that will be shipped until December 14, 2012.

Intel didn't mentioned any replacements for the discontinued products, but given the age of these chips, there are plenty of newer options from which to choose from.

All throughout the year, Intel has retired many of its older processors from the market as the company has almost revamped its entire product range with new CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

Furthermore, more SNB-based parts are expected to arrive in the not so distant future, so many Penryn processors would become obsolete by then.

The Penryn architecture was released in 2008 as a die shrink of the previous Core arch and it used the 45nm fabrication process. Processors based on this architecture feature two or four processing cores and up to 6MB of Level 2 cache.