Pentium 4 gets shown the door

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms

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Matt Elliott

Sept. 21, 2006 8:32 a.m. PT

With Core 2 Duo out in full force, Intel is expected to relegate its Pentium 4 chips to the bargain bin. Using Intel's suddenly outdated Netburst architecture, Pentium 4 CPUs will see their prices slashed by up to 58 percent at the start of 2007 as Intel looks to clear out inventory of its old chips. The price of the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 631, for example, is expected to drop nearly $100, from $163 to $69.

Intel will reportedly stop manufacturing Pentium 4 processors by Q3 of next year; production of the Netburst-based budget Celeron chip will cease in early '08. A budget line of CPUs based on Intel's new Core architecture is expected to be released in Q2 of next year. On the high end, of course, Intel's quad-core desktop CPU (Kentfield) is expected to be one of the major headliners of next year's CES.

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