Intel says NO MORE BLOOD PENTIUMS by 2016 Intel has set 2016 as the deadline for its transition to a 100 per cent conflict-free product line. Under the plan, Chipzilla will look to receive gold, tantalum, tungsten, and tin only from those smelting facilities that it has certified as taking materials exclusively from ethically-mined sources. The company unveiled the …
There is a greater degree of self interest in there for the MNCs as well these days - those minerals are 'pillaged'; pillage is of course a war crime, but there's a heavy evidential burden to get as far up the supply chain as a chip maker. However, 'pillage' is now a de facto offence predicate for money laundering. Or, in English, if you've got pillaged goods in your supply chain, you're potentially guilty of money laundering, and that's a very real threat for business.
Shameless self promotion klaxon - I wrote a paper on it that you can find at http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/technical-activities/technical-resources-search/2014/june/pillage-a-new-threat.html or if you prefer, a rather more digestible blog post at http://blogs.accaglobal.com/2014/07/15/pillage-isnt-about-viking-longboats-anymore-you-could-be-wearing-eating-and-looking-at-it/
Are Intel still selling Pentiums these Days? I never thought I'd live to see the day that the former Flagship CPU, would actually take a backseat to the Celeron line. Really though. I still think that the Yorkfield was likely their best CPU to date. So good in fact, that I haven't felt the need to update these last Six Years, or so now.
Yes, they still have a line known as the "Pentium G". Essentially, the Intel chip naming system goes like this:
i7
i5
i3
Pentium G
Celeron
(I'm ignoring the bigger iron, just the consumer chips.)
Curiously enough, AMD have done exactly the same with their low-end chips. No-one outside of AMD marketing department can remember what their 57 different mainstream chips are called now, but their cheapest and slowest CPUs are now called "Athlon" and "Sempron". I built a very cheap low power system using an "Athlon 5150" the other day. Perfectly capable of doing the simple task it needs to do, but obviously sluggish. It's actually a part designed to power phones and tablets stuck into a standard ATX form motherboard and called 'Athlon". God only knows how slow the even cheaper "Sempron" part is! Damn shame, actually - "Athlon" is a glorious name and shouldn't be sullied by this slug. Why they choose to use the no-one-ever-heard-of-it "Sempron" (in its original incarnation a lack-lustre part which gained little market recognition) instead of the warmly-remembered "Duron" (a wonderful series of cheap, fast, reliable chips which earned a very good name with the buying public) I have no idea. Perhaps the old rumour that "Duron" unexpectedly turned out to be the Spanish word for "contraceptive" has some truth in it.
Meanwhile, the Intel (current version) Celeron and especially the Pentium G parts are remarkably good performers with dual cores and more than enough oomph to use in non-CPU-intensive roles. Cash registers and POS systems, light-duty secretarial and office work, your Granny's email and Skype, these are all good uses for a Pentium G. (For that matter, my own file server has a Pentium G. It has four 4TB hard drives storing archived data and spends most of the day doing nothing at all. When I do ask it to do stuff, it's fine. I could take an i5 or an i7 home from work and upgrade it in five minutes or so, it's the same motherboard and socket - but why?)
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