A year ago From The Register No. 87 -- a year ago Intel said today that it has formally decided to kill the Pentium Pro in favour of the Pentium II platform. It will honour existing orders and give its OEM customers six months to make new orders. The processor will finally disappear in 1999. It is suffering a cruel and unnatural type of punishment, and will linger on death row for a little while yet, as Intel makes sure that vendors existing SMP systems are supported. There is no chance of a successful appeal against death sentence. Although the processor's technology is at the heart of the PII family, Intel was forced to swap to Slot technology because the price of the SRAM, included in the same package as the processor, was prohibitive. Also, Intel experienced various manufacturing difficulties with the Pro. The latest was a condition which meant Pro's suffered from excessive humidity conditions, thus making Intel ship it with that dessicated stuff you get with optical equipment. But Intel is offering a "Socket Eight" Overdrive upgrade, allowing the Pentium II to be plugged into the existing socket on Pro machines, as previously revealed here. A representative from the company also confirmed that a range of price cuts on its existing chips will happen on Sunday, 25 July. Although he declined to give details of the cuts, the Celeron is likely to be slashed in price as Intel responds to competition from IDT, AMD and NatSemi-Cyrix. ®