Intel has formally announced the end of the Pentium D 950 and 960 processors, company documents seen by Reg Hardware reveal. The Celeron D 315, 320, 325, 330 and 340 are all for the chop too, it seems.

The end-of-line announcement indicates the chip giant will take no more orders for the Celeron D and Pentium D processors after 9 March 2007, and any customer that orders the CPUs after 5 January 2007 won't be allowed to back out of the deal. These dates apply to both boxed and tray-packaged processors.

Intel canned a stack of Pentium D 8xx and 9xx processors in August, and the latest EOL anouncement will take away two of the five remaining 9xx series CPUs - the remaining chips will likely continue to be pitched at embedded applications and consumer electronics kit.

Yesterday, Intel formally unveiled the quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 ahead of next year's Core 2 Quad debut and, interestingly, Pentium processors based on the dual-core Core 2 Duo desktop chip Intel launched this past summer. ®