Two more to go...

Jul 31, 2007 09:13 GMT  ·  By

Computer hardware industry has a natural way of getting rid of products that are no longer top of the line in their category or are no longer demanded by customers. From time to time, a hardware manufacturer will announce that one or more products, be it processors, video cards, motherboards or just about everything else, will be shipped only for a limited time and then both production and shipping will be stopped. Intel made just is sort of announcement and it intends to discontinue production and shipments of 1.66GHz and 2GHz Xeon LV dual core processors beginning with the second of May, 2008.

This comes as no surprise for the computer hardware market, as more powerful and faster processors are already in place and because Intel prepares for another round in the war against AMD, which will shortly launch its own new line of server aimed processors. The Sossaman processors, as Intel called them, are based on the aging 65 nanometer "Yonah" dual core architecture, firstly introduced in 2006 on the mobile Core Duo. The LV( low voltage) versions of the processors come with 2MB of level two cache and offer support for a frontside bus frequency of 667MHz. They were primarily designed for blade servers and embedded computing solutions.

According to an Intel note cited by the news site TGDaily, "market demand has shifted to higher performance Intel processors" referring to the new generation of Woodcrest LV processors, available in both dual and quad core configurations. "One of the major drawbacks of Sossaman is the lack of support for 64-bit applications and the resulting 16 GB memory limitation". The only processor from Intel's Sossaman line that will remain in production for the time being is the mobile and embedded systems intended 1.66GHz Sossaman ULV, also known as the Xeon ULV, that has a dual core architecture and a thermal design power (TDP for short) of only 15W.