Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, Intel is bringing back a six-year-old Pentium chip from the glorious Haswell days. The Pentium G3420, which was originally discontinued in 2015, is now back up for orders.
According to the PCN (Product Change Notification) document , Intel is "cancelling this Product Discontinuance completely per new roadmap decision and enabling the product long term once again." However, we suspect that a major part of the chipmaker's decision has to do with its continuing struggle with the 14nm shortage .
The Pentium G3420 is a dual-core, HyperThreading-less chip built on the obsolete 22nm process node. The 53W processor rocks a 3.2 GHz base clock and slots into LGA1150 motherboards. In this day and age, we doubt any consumer would pick up the Pentium G3420 so the chip's revival is likely to benefit OEMs only.
With this new update, Intel's customers have until May 26, 2020 to put in their last orders for the Pentium G3420 with the last shipments going out on December 3, 2020.
We've reached out to Intel for comment and will update this story when the chipmaker replies back.
This article projects 22nm growth in popularity due to being inexpensive for the planar transistors vs using finfet.
https://semiengineering.com/foundries-prepare-for-battle-at-22nm/
Yeap, in other words a CPU for OEMs to fool corporate buyers (I'm still laughing after my clueless boss suddenly announced he was buying 100 x 21" monitors because they were "a good deal", to hell with actually buying what people want or need, this kind of scenario. Afterwards every employee just bought their own 27" monitors and brought those to work, myself included).