14 DAY TRIAL // As new processors and technologies are developed, manufacturers slowly side-line their older products. This process is known as "phasing out" and the respective products are marked as E.O.L (end of life). All hardware and software producers are using this procedure to replace their older products with new ones. "Phased out" hardware or software is replaced by newer (and hopefully improved) versions. This process is not done too quickly in order to give time to customers to upgrade their platforms. For a period of time after the "phase out", producers still offer technical support to customers while encouraging them to migrate to the newer platform (in the hardware industry this happens much faster than in the software one, as Microsoft declared Windows 98 obsolete and ceased technical support for it only in July 2006).
Intel notified its customers that the Xeon DP family processors featuring the 65 nm Dempsey core (the 5000 series) will slowly be phased out over a period of three years. Some processors from the 5000 series can still be ordered until January 2008. The dual-core CPUs with the model numbers 5080 (running at 3.73GHz, 130W and FSB 1066), 5060 (running at 3.2GHz, 130W and FSB1066), 5050 (running at 3GHz, 95W and FSB667) and 5063 (running at 3.2GHz, 95W and FSB1066) are still in production.
As Intel's Xeon 5000 processors come both in tray and boxed variants (with a significant warranty difference) the company declared that there will be two last shipment days. For the tray processors, the last shipment day will be July 16, 2010 while the boxed variant is scheduled to stop shipping on April 11, 2008. Intel declared that phasing out these processors is a move dictated by the market that has shifted to higher performance CPUs. Two Xeon processors from the 5000 series, with Dempsey core and FSB667 running at 2.67GHz (model 5030) and model 5040 (running at 2.87GHz) already have been phased out and are not available anymore.