Just a few months after launching its first Celeron and Pentium chips based on Bay Trail/Silvermont technology, Intel is starting to kill off chips such as the Intel Celeron N2810 and Pentium N3510 to make way for newer processors.

That doesn’t mean Intel is abandoning the low-power space. It’s just shifting its focus to newer chips.

Intel Bay Trai EOL

Intel’s Celeron and Pentium Bay Trail chips are aimed at tablets, notebooks, and low-power desktops and they’re based on the same architecture as the latest Atom processors, but generally offer more performance at the cost of slightly higher power consumption.

For the last few years the Atom line of processors for notebook, tablet, and desktop PCs has kind of stagnated, offering barely-noticeable speed bumps and modest improvements in efficiency. Bay Trail changed that by bringing Intel HD graphics performance to these low-power chips and dramatically increasing overall CPU performance.

While the Bay Trail-based Atom chips such as the Atom Z3770 and Z3740 aren’t going away just yet, it looks like first generation Bay Trail-based Celeron and Pentium chips will start to disappear in the coming weeks.

Here’s a rundown of the chips Intel will stop shipping in the next few months:

  • Celeron N2806, N2810, N2815, N2820, N2920
  • Pentium N2805, N2910, N3510, N3520
  • Pentium J1750, J1850, J2850

The models with N in the name are mobile chips for tablets and laptops, while the J series chips are desktop processors.

While Intel plans to launch next-gen “Cherry Trail” chips later this year, the processors that are being discontinued are already being replaced with next-gen Bay Trail chips that offer Burst mode for higher speeds as needed.

via CPU World

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

10 replies on “Intel is already phasing out first-gen Bay Trail Celeron, Pentium chips”

  1. What often happens during the life-cycle of a design is that yields get better and quality gets better so they can offer the same parts at higher clockrates. In fact, haven’t we already seen the announcement of new versions of these processors?

    1. I agree, as that’s at least part of it, but there are also other factors… like Intel has to make better and more efficient use of their FAB resources. Earlier reports of delaying making new factories, etc. shows they’re being careful not to over stretch themselves and support more than they really need.

      Slowing PC market also makes it harder to justify just stockpiling chips instead of accepting and making chips specifically for companies as required.

      While it should also be remembered that Intel now has the ATOM on “faster than Moore’s Law” rate of development… The upcoming 14nm Airmont based Cherry Trail update will be using the same FAB resources as the upcoming 14nm Broadwell and for the first time puts the ATOM on the bleeding edge of Intel’s FAB offerings, which also happens to start coming out before the end of this year and makes it much harder to justify producing more Bay Trail based chips than the market immediately requires…

      So this development should come as no surprise with all those factors considered…

  2. I was planning to buy a bay trail nuc which has been released these days, but now I’m not sure I’ll get one anymore because if they drop support there will be no more drivers availability for future os releases. But this is normal routine for Intel, I bought a cedarview board a couple of years ago and they never released windows 8 graphics drivers for it…Intel is falling down

    1. you bought something a few years ago and you wonder why it’s not supported anymore? Isn’t that normal?

      1. Well, Cedar Trail came out just as the Netbook market started to collapse… So support dried up fast… Also, like “guy” pointed out a good portion of the problem was because Cedar Trail replaced the Intel GPU with an Imagination PowerVR based one instead and they’re notorious for not providing good support to 3rd parties…

        While the real nail in Cedar Trail’s coffin was that was also about when Intel decided to re-purpose and focus on the mobile market and diverted all resources to that task… quickly coming out with Medfield and Clover Trail for mobile phones and tablets…

        So, people who bought into Cedar Trail based products were quickly left unsupported but Intel’s product line is much more stable now and also, like “guy” pointed out they’re using their own technology for the GPU now and support is much better…

        Intel also fairly recently improved their general driver support and how easy it is to find said drivers on their site…

        While, it’s generally good news for Linux users because Intel has traditionally had much better Linux support than other platforms and once driver support catches up with Bay Trail I’m sure we’ll start seeing devices based on them running just about any OS imaginable…

        Mind, though, that this all only applies to Intel’s tablet and higher range devices… For phones Intel’s upcoming Merrifield update will still use an Imagination PowerVR GPU but they don’t plan them to run anything but Android anyway…

      2. Usually you’ll have a few years in which newer features are actively developed, and then a longer period of time in which compatibility is maintained and only critical bugfixes are supplied in the drivers. For instance, I have a DirectX 10 GPU, Nvidia recently stopped updating my GPU’s featureset, but I’m still going to get drivers for compatibility with newer versions of Window’s for some time to come. But I bought that in 2009, so Nvidia was actively developing new features for my GPU a full two years longer than Intel totally abandoned and stopped caring about the existence of their Intel Atom CPU’s. Three years is way too short a time.

    2. That is exactly why Intel has moves from PowerVR GPUs to their own well supported GPUs. Not even Intel with their vast amounts of money could get updated drivers from Imagination Technologies. It’s a lot worse on the Linux side with PowerVR where usually hardware works better as time moves along but Imagination made sure that didn’t happen.

      Also, this product change notice just means certain Atoms will be replaced by faster ones with more features. The underlying architecure is the same especially the GPU. That means the same core drivers will be used for both the old and new Atoms.

      So, yes, Intel was falling in 2011 but in 2014 they’re pretty much on the rise for the most part. You should try to understand what’s going on before casting aside a company. Too bad most consumers don’t do this and mostly rely on outdated information from the past. Kind of like how some elderly people in the US still think Hondas and Toyotas are extremely unreliable and will break on you in less than a year.

    1. Hopefully, the OEMs can easily switch to the newer Bay Trail chips. They’ll either not ship the first version or just ship the ones that’s already been built.

Comments are closed.