this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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It's apparently the Pentium 1 and older, so those chips were discontinued in 1999. Almost 26 years old.
Ditching i686 could be a problem for people running 32-bit stuff on modern hardware, though. I expect that'll hang around for a while yet.
To be clear, you still still be able to run 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit kernel. So, there will be no more kernel support for Pentium (in 5 years or more) but you will still run i686 userland code. I do not see this changing for a very long time.
There were still new 486 compatible chips being released up until about 2010.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86
They released a 486sx (no FPU) in 2007.