I asked ChatGPT for intel's most popular selling CPU category by quarter with clock speeds--

I added some notes on the processor make and the capacitor plague--

1997 Q1: Pentium MMX (166-233 MHz)<-- P55C
1997 Q2: Pentium MMX (166-233 MHz)<-- P55C
1997 Q3: Pentium MMX (166-233 MHz)<-- P55C
1997 Q4: Pentium II (233-300 MHz) <-- Klamath

1998 Q1: Pentium II (233-450 MHz) <-- Klamath/ Deschutes
1998 Q2: Pentium II (233-450 MHz) <-- Klamath/ Deschutes
1998 Q3: Pentium II (233-450 MHz) <-- Deschutes
1998 Q4: Pentium II (233-450 MHz) <-- Deschutes

1999 Q1: Pentium II (233-450 MHz) <-- Deschutes
1999 Q2: Pentium III (450-600 MHz) <-- Katmai
1999 Q3: Pentium III (450-600 MHz) <-- Katmai ** Beginning of the capacitor plague **
1999 Q4: Pentium III (450-600 MHz) <-- Katmai

2000 Q1: Pentium III (500-1.13 GHz) <-- Coppermine
2000 Q2: Pentium III (500-1.13 GHz) <-- Coppermine
2000 Q3: Pentium III (500-1.13 GHz) <-- Coppermine
2000 Q4: Pentium 4 (1.3-1.5 GHz) <-- Willamette

2001 Q1: Pentium 4 (1.4-2.0 GHz) <-- Willamette
2001 Q2: Pentium 4 (1.4-2.0 GHz) <-- Willamette
2001 Q3: Pentium 4 (1.4-2.0 GHz) <-- Willamette
2001 Q4: Pentium 4 (1.4-2.0 GHz) <-- Willamette

2002 Q1: Pentium 4 (1.8-2.8 GHz) <-- Northwood
2002 Q2: Pentium 4 (1.8-2.8 GHz) <-- Northwood
2002 Q3: Pentium 4 (1.8-2.8 GHz) <-- Northwood
2002 Q4: Pentium 4 (1.8-2.8 GHz) <-- Northwood

2003 Q1: Pentium 4 (2.0-3.2 GHz) <-- Northwood HT
2003 Q2: Pentium 4 (2.0-3.2 GHz) <-- Northwood HT ** Capacitor plague begins to subside **
2003 Q3: Pentium 4 (2.0-3.2 GHz) <-- Northwood HT
2003 Q4: Pentium 4 (2.0-3.2 GHz) <-- Northwood HT

2004 Q1: Pentium 4 (2.4-3.4 GHz) <-- Prescott
2004 Q2: Pentium 4 (2.4-3.4 GHz) <-- Prescott
2004 Q3: Pentium 4 (2.4-3.4 GHz) <-- Prescott
2004 Q4: Pentium 4 (2.8-3.8 GHz) <-- Prescott

2005 Q1: Pentium 4 (2.8-3.8 GHz) <-- Prescott 2M
2005 Q2: Pentium 4(2.8-3.8 GHz) <-- Prescott 2M
2005 Q3: Pentium D (2.66-3.2 GHz) <-- Smithfield
2005 Q4: Pentium D (2.66-3.2 GHz) <-- Smithfield

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plagu … %20least%202007.

douglar wrote on 2024-08-29, 16:45:

I asked ChatGPT for intel's most popular selling CPU category by quarter with clock speeds--

how would it know? Afaik Intel never published this type of data.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-08-29, 22:27:

douglar wrote on 2024-08-29, 16:45:

I asked ChatGPT for intel's most popular selling CPU category by quarter with clock speeds--

how would it know? Afaik Intel never published this type of data.

It would probably... make it up?

(Don't mind me, I'm a generative AI skeptic)

The thing is - it's a safe guess for most quarters to assume that the mainstream family (i.e. Pentium III/4/etc) would win, especially before they invented the silly i3/i5/i7 stratification (my gut would tell me i5 outsells the others, but who knows), but there are going to be exceptions, e.g. I believe that the quarter Conroe launched in 2006 and maybe the following quarter as well, HotBurst Pentium 4s and/or Ds still outshipped the new lineup, just due to manufacturing/supply chain issues.

(Now, I suspect most of those late-2006 HotBursts went to businesses in Dell OptiPlexes and the like that had fixed lifecycles, but I feel bad for anybody who bought one for home. If you bought the Conroe, you got something that's... at least partially... usable until 2025. If you bought the HotBurst, you got something that was obsolete at some point in the early Win7 era.)

Check out some old forum posts and industry articles from that era or a year or two after, it seems that the early coppermine CPUs especially the higher clocked ones weren't easy to get: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/pentium- … 100-fsb.559720/
This interesting article on shortages of 700MHz+ parts when Slot 1 & 100MHz was still the main option, because of problems with moving to Flip-Chip packaging: https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/14/disast … permine_supply/
This article from eetimes says even Dell had to wait for supply while an issue was fixed: https://www.eetimes.com/dell-feels-effects-of … l-cpu-shortage/
And another article from the register on shortages: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/26/huge_s … l_problems_hit/

Most of the slot 1 P3s I've ever come across are Katmai and a couple are coppermines but they're usually pretty low clock rates like 650MHz despite being coppermine. My suspicion is that there were always less of them in the wild, because of those gaps in supply and Slot 1 being on the way out. From those articles it looks like Dell got the pick of what was available so that kind of explains why there are fast Dell Dimension XPS slot 1 systems but few other OEM have them.
Once that supply shortage resolved itself the 133MHz parts and socket 370 were much more common with suitable motherboards, then those went into OEM systems instead in huge numbers. The 133MHz FSB CPUs are not hard to find from all the i810 small form factor office machines from the era.

Slot 1 CPUs probably had a scenario like the Pentium Overdrive chips, why buy an expensive Slot 1 processor that can only be used with a Slot 1 SDRAM motherboard at the slower 100MHz FSB when Socket 370 can be used in either with a cheap slotket?

The i820 fiasco could've held stuff up and limited availability too, the move to 133MHz FSB was supposed to be quite an important jump in performance / product differentiation and I don't recall that Intel had many Slot 1 133MHz capable motherboards / chipsets where Via seemed like the only option for a while, until the (mostly) Socket 370 only i815 came out. Check this out, what a mess: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/performa … hz-fsb,168.html

It's kind of a shame too, it seems there are more fast 100MHz FSB Pentium 3 CPUs in laptops where that bus speed held on for a bit longer with the 440BX until the i830MP chipset arrived (at which point those used Tualatin CPUs) . But we can't use those somewhat more available CPUs with desktops.

-----------
For the earlier stuff like Deschutes cores and the Katmai P3, that's probably because server CPUs didn't get the Xeon line until late in the Pentium II's life. So quite a few Pentium II and Pentium III Katmai CPUs we have now came from decommissioned servers, but later CPUs were split out into Xeon / Consumer grade.

Of course that was the time when Intel got done for unfair practices...
Might have something to do with it?

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-08-29, 23:11:

Check out some old forum posts and industry articles from that era or a year or two after, it seems that the early coppermine CP […]
Show full quote

Check out some old forum posts and industry articles from that era or a year or two after, it seems that the early coppermine CPUs especially the higher clocked ones weren't easy to get: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/pentium- … 100-fsb.559720/
This interesting article on shortages of 700MHz+ parts when Slot 1 & 100MHz was still the main option, because of problems with moving to Flip-Chip packaging: https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/14/disast … permine_supply/
This article from eetimes says even Dell had to wait for supply while an issue was fixed: https://www.eetimes.com/dell-feels-effects-of … l-cpu-shortage/
And another article from the register on shortages: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/26/huge_s … l_problems_hit/

I had no trouble getting a 667MHZ with an Abit 815e motherboard back inthe day, but yeah, anything faster was tought to get. Didn’t have an ISA slot. Didn’t miss it at the time. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-se6-1.0
That was the last abit motherboard I ever got. It didnt last very long.

I guess the other thing I was forgetting - the 450MHz Deschutes and Katmai are 6 month apart. The first Coppermines are 8 months later. The i815 chipset (which roughly corresponds with the move to 133FSB and the end of Slot 1) is 9 months later. And the first Willamettes are 5 months later.

It's actually somewhat insane, looking back on it - you go from the 450MHz Deschutes (which for some reason has always felt extremely popular to me) to the first Willamette in 27 months.

Northwood to Prescott is 2 years. Prescott to Conroe (and yes, I'm ignoring the Pentium Ds, the 65nm die shrink, etc) is 29 months.

So in some way, that may help explain why there seem to be sooooo many more surviving Pentium 4 systems (despite the capacitor plague) - they were just around much longer.

Meanwhile, something like an 850MHz slot 1 coppermine... officially launched March 2000; by July 2000, the Dells of the world were phasing out Slot 1 systems. Add production issues, etc, and... that's basically 2 months' worth of chips. And two months where this was the second-highest-end 100FSB chip Intel offered...

I have two 800 MHz Slot 1 coppermines. Ebay was floated with them 15 years ago. Cooler points towards OEM machines.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-30, 02:00:

I guess the other thing I was forgetting - the 450MHz Deschutes and Katmai are 6 month apart. The first Coppermines are 8 months […]
Show full quote

I guess the other thing I was forgetting - the 450MHz Deschutes and Katmai are 6 month apart. The first Coppermines are 8 months later. The i815 chipset (which roughly corresponds with the move to 133FSB and the end of Slot 1) is 9 months later. And the first Willamettes are 5 months later.

It's actually somewhat insane, looking back on it - you go from the 450MHz Deschutes (which for some reason has always felt extremely popular to me) to the first Willamette in 27 months.

Northwood to Prescott is 2 years. Prescott to Conroe (and yes, I'm ignoring the Pentium Ds, the 65nm die shrink, etc) is 29 months.

So in some way, that may help explain why there seem to be sooooo many more surviving Pentium 4 systems (despite the capacitor plague) - they were just around much longer.

Meanwhile, something like an 850MHz slot 1 coppermine... officially launched March 2000; by July 2000, the Dells of the world were phasing out Slot 1 systems. Add production issues, etc, and... that's basically 2 months' worth of chips. And two months where this was the second-highest-end 100FSB chip Intel offered...

Everyone and their brother always settled on 450’s even long after they were very middling and obsolete.

That speed grade felt like it had an extremely long retail shelf life compared to everything else in that era.

Nearly 5 years after the first 450’s launched they were still trying to sell that speed in brand new “value” laptops

ux-3 wrote on 2024-08-30, 04:59:

I have two 800 MHz Slot 1 coppermines. Ebay was floated with them 15 years ago. Cooler points towards OEM machines.

This is it. Intel sold a ton of these and there are a ton still around. It's just that the COVID hoarding has shoved them all into "collections." When I put together my slot 1 system 2 years ago, you could easily get a nice slot 1 Coppermine for $25. I ended up with an 800E free with a motherboard I bought on ebay (which honestly might be the best way to buy a slot 1 CPU nowadays with all this scalping and hoarding).

Estate sales are where all this junk will end up when people's families have to liquidate their niche junk.

smtkr wrote on 2024-08-31, 02:19:

Estate sales are where all this junk will end up when people's families have to liquidate their niche junk.

This. The second most advantageous point of Western retro communities I envy.

While many fellow retro hobbyists around the world envy Taiwan's small area (so many sellers are within driving distances) and high proportion of self-assembled desktops instead of pre-built brands, yard sales are very rare in Taiwan as whoever can afford a house with front yard usually don't give a sh*t on used computers (or whatever used items with redeeming values) and would leave them to moving services when they move. For residents of smaller apartments or studios most would simply drop them to designated oversized trash pickup locations or sell them online. Streets and housing designs and regulations also prohibit most forms of estate sales.

To "intercept" a used computer relies on observing a tenant moving out your neighborhood (usually near the end of calendar months, especially at the end of semesters if you live near a college campus) and some pure good luck.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-29, 12:04:

The other observation I will make is that I didn't realize until fairly recently how many 1GHz socket 370 coppermines seemingly landed in large OEM i810 systems. Such a waste.

Forgive my ignorance but why would this be a waste? What would be suitable for an i810?

Spark wrote on 2024-09-01, 12:18:

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-29, 12:04:

The other observation I will make is that I didn't realize until fairly recently how many 1GHz socket 370 coppermines seemingly landed in large OEM i810 systems. Such a waste.

Forgive my ignorance but why would this be a waste? What would be suitable for an i810?

The i810 is a low-end chipset with the first iteration of Intel's on-chipset graphics (very very very bad, only suitable for 2D and barely) and no AGP slot, i.e. no way to put a decent graphics card after the fact.

Meanwhile, the 1GHz Coppermine was, at least one point, a flagship CPU. Intel's best.

I suppose there could be a case to be made for i810 business systems with good processors, but for home use, it's just a waste - if you're buying a top of the line processor, you probably at least want the opportunity to do some gaming. I would almost go further and say that a 1GHz i810 HP Pavilion or other home machine is basically a scam - they lure unsuspecting buyers with lots of GHz and lots of megabytes, sell it as one of the top-priced systems at the Staples or the Worst Buy, but they don't tell you about the gigantic flaw in the graphics.

Let me put it this way - if you wanted to get your grandmother or aunt her first computer so she could do some basic web browsing and emailing and whatnot, sure, i810 graphics are adequate, but at that point, just get a cheap Celeron, like a 6-700MHz or something. That's the type of bargain system the i810 should be used in. And to me, that's what the i810 is associated with - cheap, eMachinesque junk. 1GHz PIIIs are not cheap eMachinesque junk.

I would actually go one step further and suggest that the i810/Celeron may have been the first time the x86 computer world really launched something intentionally low-end. Prior to that era, high end stuff just aged and dropped in price and eventually became low end - e.g. a 486DX2/66 was a flagship processor in 1992, by 1996, it'd be in extremely low-end new systems. The i810/Celeron represented a shift for the industry, one that really matured a decade later with the i3/i5/i7 branding, where new isn't always better than old and where 7 year old high-end can outperform brand new low end. More like cars where a new car in one segment is better than older cars in the same segment, but not directly 'better' than an older car in a higher-end segment. That's the context the i810 needs to be analyzed in - a race to the bottom where everybody is rushing to push out Win98 home machines at ever lower price points made out of ever-lower-end standardized components.

And others may disagree, but I would go so far as saying that the i810 is useless as a retro system. i815 boards/systems/etc are plentiful if you want a later PIII with no ISA. Take the nice processor off the i810 board and let the i810 board go to the ewaste dump where it should have been 20+ years ago.

From Intel's perspective, i810 + 1GHz PIII wasn't a waste at all. Quite the opposite. The CPU was fully expected to do all the heavy lifting. Clock cycles were ascending toward the heavens and easy computing rained down in turn.

Big Pink wrote on 2024-09-01, 13:43:

From Intel's perspective, i810 + 1GHz PIII wasn't a waste at all. Quite the opposite. The CPU was fully expected to do all the heavy lifting. Clock cycles were ascending toward the heavens and easy computing rained down in turn.

P3 1GHz was paper announced in February 2000 just to not look bad in light of AMD actually _shipping_ 1GHz Athlons. It was a paper launch at $990. It was meant to be used with expensive (~$300) i820 motherboards https://www.anandtech.com/show/461 and EXTREMELY expensive RDRAM. We are talking $750 per 128MB versus $100 for SDRAM.

In a big blow to Intel Press didnt buy the "Intel first to 1GHz" false paper release forcing Intel to "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades" and actually ship 1.13GHz $990 Pentium 3 in July 2000 ... just to recall ALL of those less than 30 days later as defective (aka Extreme Overclocking didnt hold outside of controlled environment of the lab, or even controlled environment of reviewers labs) https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/intel … iii-2708220.php

Not to mention in the midst of all of this in May 2000 Intel was also recalling 1 million i820 motherboards https://www.theregister.com/2000/05/16/camino … or_replacement/ https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-cape-cod-disaster/

'i810 + 1GHz PIII' was selling $50 motherboard with $1000 (discounted to mere $669) flagship processor.

Btw: RIP Anandtech.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 12:46:

I suppose there could be a case to be made for i810 business systems with good processors, but for home use, it's just a waste - if you're buying a top of the line processor, you probably at least want the opportunity to do some gaming. I would almost go further and say that a 1GHz i810 HP Pavilion or other home machine is basically a scam - they lure unsuspecting buyers with lots of GHz and lots of megabytes, sell it as one of the top-priced systems at the Staples or the Worst Buy, but they don't tell you about the gigantic flaw in the graphics.

I've got a friend working in a medical equipment company. He told me that those doctors often want the best computer specs money could buy (e.g. Intel i9 + Z-series motherboard + flagship Nvidia GPU) not for medical equipment but for their offices. It's not that they need those specs for playing triple-A games at their offices; they want the best simply because the could afford the best. Sellers are, of course, very happy to satisfy such requests. 😜 Therefore when those salespersons at electronic wholesalers found the gigahertz digit could be far more persuasive than other specs they would advertise the clock speed in order to attract grandmas and aunties. A similar (and ongoing) phenomenon is the megapixel war on smartphone cameras.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-01, 16:22:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 12:46:

I suppose there could be a case to be made for i810 business systems with good processors, but for home use, it's just a waste - if you're buying a top of the line processor, you probably at least want the opportunity to do some gaming. I would almost go further and say that a 1GHz i810 HP Pavilion or other home machine is basically a scam - they lure unsuspecting buyers with lots of GHz and lots of megabytes, sell it as one of the top-priced systems at the Staples or the Worst Buy, but they don't tell you about the gigantic flaw in the graphics.

I've got a friend working in a medical equipment company. He told me that those doctors often want the best computer specs money could buy (e.g. Intel i9 + Z-series motherboard + flagship Nvidia GPU) not for medical equipment but for their offices. It's not that they need those specs for playing triple-A games at their offices; they want the best simply because the could afford the best. Sellers are, of course, very happy to satisfy such requests. 😜 Therefore when those salespersons at electronic wholesalers found the gigahertz digit could be far more persuasive than other specs they would advertise the clock speed in order to attract grandmas and aunties. A similar (and ongoing) phenomenon is the megapixel war on smartphone cameras.

But I think you're proving my point. If someone walks into a store in the second half of 2000 wanting "the best", and you sell them an i810 board with a 1.0GHz PIII, you basically scammed them. The correct answer to someone walking in and wanting "the best" in the second half of 2000 is to sell them a 1GHz PIII with an i815 board and a GeForce 2 GTS. And similarly, if the i810 board has SoundMax or whatever AC97 audio, that is not the best - the best would have been an SB Live or equivalent from one of the non-Creative vendors. And similarly if the i810 system came with a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive (those were still around in 2000, barely, I think), that would not have been the best.

So I stand by my view - selling a Dell L series or some HP i810 system with a 1GHz PIII Coppermine to someone who wants "the best" and is prepared to pay for it is basically scamming them.

I don't think that the 1GHz Pentium III CPUs sold with i810 motherboards were mis-sold, but the landscape of Intel's product range at the time was a bit complicated. The Pentium 4 was 'king' of the Intel chips but it was tied to the i850 and cost-prohibitive RDRAM. The i845 (SDRAM only, not DDR) didn't come out until September 2001: https://www.anandtech.com/show/826 (RIP Anandtech, may your articles remain indexed for a long time)
Which I think meant that the Pentium III was the mid-range option for a while still. Tualatin arrived in July 2001 so there was probably stock of fast coppermines to clear out.

Perhaps many of these 1GHz Pentium III CPUs were a mid-range option for pre-builts that didn't want to drop down to a Celeron, certainly that's something I recall seeing frequently in pre-builts at offices and schools for years after.
The i810 at the time of release was 'kind of' competitive, it could play Quake 3 relatively well, just a shame it sacrificed the AGP slot to do it which really limited their longevity.

At the time I jumped from a Celeron 300A @ 450 to an AMD Thunderbird 800 system so didn't pay much attention to Intel until the Pentium 4 got faster and had DDR chipsets available.

Ah yes I see. Thanks for the explanation gents.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 16:45:

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-01, 16:22:

I've got a friend working in a medical equipment company. He told me that those doctors often want the best computer specs money could buy (e.g. Intel i9 + Z-series motherboard + flagship Nvidia GPU) not for medical equipment but for their offices. It's not that they need those specs for playing triple-A games at their offices; they want the best simply because the could afford the best. Sellers are, of course, very happy to satisfy such requests. 😜 Therefore when those salespersons at electronic wholesalers found the gigahertz digit could be far more persuasive than other specs they would advertise the clock speed in order to attract grandmas and aunties. A similar (and ongoing) phenomenon is the megapixel war on smartphone cameras.

But I think you're proving my point. If someone walks into a store in the second half of 2000 wanting "the best", and you sell them an i810 board with a 1.0GHz PIII, you basically scammed them. The correct answer to someone walking in and wanting "the best" in the second half of 2000 is to sell them a 1GHz PIII with an i815 board and a GeForce 2 GTS. And similarly, if the i810 board has SoundMax or whatever AC97 audio, that is not the best - the best would have been an SB Live or equivalent from one of the non-Creative vendors. And similarly if the i810 system came with a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive (those were still around in 2000, barely, I think), that would not have been the best.

So I stand by my view - selling a Dell L series or some HP i810 system with a 1GHz PIII Coppermine to someone who wants "the best" and is prepared to pay for it is basically scamming them.

Well I agreed with you; guess I didn't make myself clear enough. 😅 I probably clicked "submit" without a paragraph:

Most grandmas, aunties, and other computer novices don't have doctors' fat wallets. Imagine when they walked into a wholesale with, say, $1500 budget in summer of year 2000, and you were a salesperson, which of the two similarly-priced computers was easier for you to sell? A P3-1000 with onboard graphics and sound, or a P3-600 (less than half the price of P3-1000) with GF2 GTS and Live! / Vortex2? It would be difficult to explain FPS or SNR to a computer novice (especially those with little interest in latest games), but everyone knows 1000 > 600. Then the store manager's monthly report would conclude "contact our supplier that we need more P3-1000 with integrated sound and video at $1500 price range; no need for independent sound and video cards as few customers were attracted by those specs."