Intel Resuscitates 22nm Haswell Pentium Processor

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By Zhiye Liu
last updated

Looks like the Pentium G3420 is making a comeback.

Pentium G3420

Pentium G3420 (Image credit: Amazon)

Update: Intel has issued a new product change notice that says the company never intended to discontinue the 22nm Haswell Pentium processor, and had issued the prior notice in error. You can read the details here. 

Original Article:

Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, Intel is bringing back a six-year-old Pentium chip from the glorious Haswell days. The Pentium G3420, which was discontinued recently, is now back up for orders.

According to the PCN (Product Change Notification) document, Intel is "cancelling this Product Discontinuance completely per new roadmap decision and enabling the product long term once again." However, we suspect that a major part of the chipmaker's decision has to do with its continuing struggle with the 14nm shortage.

The Pentium G3420 is a dual-core, HyperThreading-less chip built on the obsolete 22nm process node. The 53W processor rocks a 3.2 GHz base clock and slots into LGA1150 motherboards. In this day and age, we doubt any consumer would pick up the Pentium G3420 so the chip's revival is likely to benefit OEMs only.

We've reached out to Intel for comment and will update this story when the chipmaker replies back.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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30 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JayNor
    Intel is building a 22FFL base IO layer for Lakefield for its ultra low leakage properties.

    This article projects 22nm growth in popularity due to being inexpensive for the planar transistors vs using finfet.

    https://semiengineering.com/foundries-prepare-for-battle-at-22nm/
    Reply
  • dstln
    I feel bad for the customer that gets duped into buying a system with this.
    Reply
  • AlistairAB
    dstln said:
    I feel bad for the customer that gets duped into buying a system with this.

    Yeap, in other words a CPU for OEMs to fool corporate buyers (I'm still laughing after my clueless boss suddenly announced he was buying 100 x 21" monitors because they were "a good deal", to hell with actually buying what people want or need, this kind of scenario. Afterwards every employee just bought their own 27" monitors and brought those to work, myself included).
    Reply
  • King_V
    AlistairAB said:
    Yeap, in other words a CPU for OEMs to fool corporate buyers (I'm still laughing after my clueless boss suddenly announced he was buying 100 x 21" monitors because they were "a good deal", to hell with actually buying what people want or need, this kind of scenario. Afterwards every employee just bought their own 27" monitors and brought those to work, myself included).

    Sadly, this still technically "proved" that the boss saved money. At least, if the boss was short-sighted enough to make that purchase, then he's shortsighted enough to believe that employees buying their own monitors for the workplace saved the company money - and now sets up expectations for other kinds of savings he can manage on the backs of his employees.
    Reply
  • Keviny Oliveira
    dstln said:
    I feel bad for the customer that gets duped into buying a system with this.
    Same bro.
    Reply
  • Keviny Oliveira
    R.I.P Intel
    Reply
  • Giroro
    For what it's worth, If you delid a Haswell i-5, you can easily overclock the 3.4GHz 4670k up to 4.3GHz or a more on air- and with similar IPC to Zen+ it's would totally be viable as a budget PC option (at least if you don't care about efficiency or security against speculative exploits). I just upgraded to Ryzen 3700x and.. I haven't really noticed much difference in a lot of day-to-day use cases

    So Intel's 22nm isn't inherently that bad if Intel was to use better TIM and tweak the Haswell design... It really speaks to how little Intel has done to improve their processors in the last 6 years, until AMD forced them to start adding cores.
    But since Intel isn't putting an updated design into the old process, I think they either have a customer who needs a LOT more of the same old thing their current system uses, because they can't/won't qualify new hardware (some military somewhere?). Or they might have a big customer/market where using cheap DDR3 RAM is more important than processing speed (China?)
    But If it was purely for RAM comparability, I don't know why they would spin up a their 2 core design instead of 4.
    Reply
  • Zizo007
    This CPU is ****. It can't even compete with the 35W Athlon 3000G which also has much better graphics at 49$.

    I won't even pay 10$ for this lmao
    Reply
  • Zizo007
    The Athlon 3000G is at least twice as fast as this.
    Selling this is an insult for customers lol
    Reply
  • punkncat
    I figure that some very large entity wanted an order of these large enough to force Intels hand into making a run available. It states in the article that this will be an OEM only run. Figure something along the lines of someone building a butt ton of kiosk type, low processing power required environment and to echo Giroro, probably don't want to pay for DDR4, had 3 on hand, etc.
    I am highly doubtful we will see these on the shelf in Best Buy equipped inside an econo box. Uninformed consumer or not there is FAR too much inexpensive equipment available that outperforms this by far for a purchasing agent to put company rep on the line in that way.
    Reply