Haswell is back: Intel reverses decision to discontinue 22nm Pentium CPUs

mongeese

Posts: 643   +123
The big picture: The world’s largest chipmaker isn’t large enough... 14nm supply issues have plagued Intel for nearly two years since they began the switch to the improved 10nm node, which has failed to be efficient enough to satisfy market demand. Despite an apology and a myriad of ‘solutions’ Intel’s troubles have limited the sales of PC and laptop manufacturers, forcing Dell and others to look at AMD. Intel, in turn, has reportedly reached out to Samsung and TSMC for help and will be keeping their older chips around, too.

Intel has officially rescinded their end of life notice for the Pentium G3420, a 22nm Haswell chip released in 2013, only a week after first discontinuing it. The aging dual-core will “continue to be available for orders as usual.” While the G3420 is the only chip we can confirm has disappeared and reappeared, we’ve reached out to Intel to inquire about its other Haswell siblings. They’re mostly listed as available on Intel’s website, currently.

In their Product Change Notification, Intel lists the reason for the G3420’s auspicious return as a “new roadmap decision” which, though vague, seems almost guaranteed to be referring to Intel’s 14nm shortage given the context. To make some haphazard guesses, the original discontinuance was possibly a result of standard policy, before someone realized they still needed it.

The G3420 was mildly disinteresting when it first released six years ago, with two cores, two threads, and a clock of 3.2 GHz we thought it was about time for Intel to get a new architecture and node (ha!). At present the processor looks downright terrible, supporting DDR3-1600 as its fastest memory. Perhaps OEMs still use it, as hopefully, most consumers would realize newer Pentiums and Ryzen APUs offer much better value.

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Still chomping digits with my used $50 Xeon x5680 (6 core, 12 thread, CPU Mark 8,354) running in a used $80 Dell T3500. G3420 gets a CPU Mark of less than half of that (3,395). Oh, did I tell you about the 3-channel RAM?
 
It's nice to see Intel taking its own marketing advice and making sure we have good CPUs for running Word.
 
Still chomping digits with my used $50 Xeon x5680 (6 core, 12 thread, CPU Mark 8,354) running in a used $80 Dell T3500. G3420 gets a CPU Mark of less than half of that (3,395). Oh, did I tell you about the 3-channel RAM?

I still have an X5675 overclocked to 4.6Ghz on a ASUS Rampage II Extreme put away as a backup PC ;-P
 
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