Intel Breathes New Life Into Pentium 207
angry tapir writes "Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers. The dual-core processor operates at a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has 3MB of cache. Like many server chips, the Pentium 350 lacks features such as integrated graphics, which are on most of Intel's laptop and desktop processors."
Re:Dual core for servers? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
And this is also nothing new. They've been selling "Pentiums" for some time now. The Pentium G6950 is one for the last generation Core i series systems (LGA1156). The Pentium G600 and G800 series are for this generation core i series (LGA1155, Sandy Bridge). They are the same architecture as the i series chips, just more cut down.
So for example with the current LGA1155 offerings:
-- The i7-2600/2700 are the quad core, hyperthreaded chips with 8MB cache.
-- The i5s are quad core, non-HT, 6MB cache.
-- The i3s are dual core, hyperthreaded, 3MB cache. They also lack AES-NI instructions.
-- The Pentiums are dual core, non-HT, 3MB cache and have slower graphics and clockspeed. They also lack AVX instructions (and AES-NI).
-- The Celerons are even slower, and 2 or 1MB of cache, and the lowest end one is single core.
In all cases they are all Sandy Bridge. They are 32nm chips with that core architecture. The lower end ones just have less features, cache, clockspeed, and so on and thus can be made cheaper.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Re:It's only a matter of time. (Score:5, Informative)
Because the ageing pentium architecture was a mess, and they needed to redesign from scratch for the Core 2 architecture - which was a great improvement. They stopped using the pentium brand because they stopped selling chips with any pentium-based technology in.
What is the "Pentium architecture"? The microarchitecture of the original Pentium (P5) was different from the microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III (P6), and P6 was different from the microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 (NetBurst), and NetBurst was different from the microarchitecture of the Pentium M (which was, I think, P6-derived). The microarchitecture of the Core 2 (Core) was, I think, Pentium M-derived.
So there's Pentium-the-chip (P5), and there's Pentium-the-brand, which was first used with the P5 chip but was also used with chips with significantly different microarchitectures from the P5 chip.
The Pentium 350 apparently uses the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, along with a bunch of other microprocessors [intel.com], some named Core, some named Xeon, some named Celeron, and some named Pentium. Some of the ones named Pentium were launched in Q3 2011, before the Pentium 350, so "Intel Breathes New Life Into Pentium" is, to use the technical term, a "complete bullshit headline".
Re:Smart move by intel (Score:5, Informative)
HP Microservers sold like hotcakes, and were based around AMD's Athlon II Neo N36L processor - which is 64bit, dual core, 25W TDP, VT-x etc. No doubt Intel want part of this pie
Re:Dual core for servers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dual core for servers? (Score:4, Informative)
Desktops don't have ECC. This does.
Really? Because even a low end AMD motherboard supports (certainly the 40GBP range ASUS ones do) ECC. It's very hard to find such a low-clocked processor as the 1.8GHz Pentium 350, but processors don't put out all that much heat if you don't use them much. It's also a motherboard which allows for easy underclocking, should you wish to reduce the power draw.
A cluster**** of unclearly-positioned brands (Score:5, Informative)
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here [dabs.com] and here [ebuyer.com], for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
Re:Dual core for servers? (Score:2, Informative)
RAID 6 = 2 disks for "parity"
Re:This actually makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, a server is one of the few places I actually want an integrated graphics chip, because it means I don't have to take up a PCI slot and associated energy and I/O load with a low-end graphics card just to provide a console, not to mention the space considerations and form factor requirements to be able to put in a PCI card. While I like that it's not built into the CPU (freeing up those transistors for, you know, CPU things), I'd still be buying a motherboard that has built in cheap graphics.
If you're in a situation where network and disk bandwidth is the limiting factor, then why wouldn't you put in a ULV celeron chip? My laptop has a 1.2GHz dual core with 2MB of cache, and a TDP of 18W, and while that is 3W higher than the processor in TFA, that's also including the graphics card, which this one isn't. And failing that, try putting in an Atom... I have built Atom-powered fileservers before, and they run very well: even with an Atom, the limiting factor is disk I/O, not CPU power for a fileserver.