14 DAY TRIAL // As Intel prepares for a new line of desktop and mobile processors, the company decided that it was time to get rid of some of its older products and to stop manufacturing and shipping them. Affected by this decision are two main lines of products as the company will stop producing processors from the first Core generation as well as processing units like the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 which are based on the quad core architecture.
According to the news site reghardware, Intel informed its retail dealers and other partners that the manufacturing process of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU will soon stop and the last honored orders will have to be placed until the 2th of November 2007, while the very last shipment will leave the Intel manufacturing facilities on the 4th of January 2008. As the central processing unit manufacturer recently launched the quad core QX6850 which reaches 3GHz while sporting an 1333MHz frontside bus, the older Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor is becoming obsolete as it has a standard running frequency of 2.66GHz and a slower frontside bus of only 1066MHz. Intel now has three Core 2 Extreme processors built for desktop use and all of them are priced at $999. The company cannot drop all the older chips as compatibility with some older but still widely used chipsets must be maintained, so the 2.93GHz QX6800 processing unit is still on the viable product list, while the slower QX6700 is no longer supported.
Apart from the older Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor, Intel also plans to get rid of an entire generation of units built using the 65 nanometer fabrication process, as it wants to promote the upcoming 45nm based processing units. As the Penryn Core 2 central processing units are expected to be officially launched sometime in November, the company has only a limited time to empty its inventories of all the Core Solo and Core Duo CPUs. Ranging from the entry level T2300 processors which run to 1.66GHz and reaching to the once high level 2.33GHz T7200, the Core 2 Duo line of products is soon to be declared EOL (End Of Life). Alongside them, the low-voltage Core Duo L2500 as well as the 1.06GHz Core Solo U1300 and Core Solo T1300 and T1400 which clocked at 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz, respectively, are going to share the same fate. From the old Celeron M line of products, Intel announced that units like the 420 through 450 models will be discharged too.
Order for these lines of products will continue to be registered until the last day of the year and the last expected date to ship the processors is the 6th of March 2009 in the case of tray-mounted Cores and the 8th of September 2008 for tray-packed Celeron Ms.