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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

6 years ago was 2019. You were working in 2019 with "brand new 32-bit-only Celerons" which had no 64 bit support?!

Nah mate, something doesn't add up. I can't buy this. Even the cheapest Atoms had 64bit support much earlier than that and Atoms were lower tier silicone than Celeron so you can't tell me Intel had brand new 32 bit only Celerons in 2019.

My Google-fu found the last 32-bit only chips intel shipped were the Intel Quark embedded SoCs EoL in 2015. So what you're saying doesn't pass the smell test.

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May have been 2018. Definitely not that long before covid. Suppliers in the embedded space will stockpile EOL parts for desperate integrators such as ourselves, and can continue to supply new units for years after they're discontinued. The product needed a custom linux kernel compile and it took a while to get that working on 64-bit and we had to ship new units. Yes the COGS get ridiculous.

Sure, but in that case it probably wasn't a Celeron, and there's industrial players still keeping 386 systems alive for one reason or another, but it feels in bad faith to call it "brand new" when it's actually "~10 year old, new old stock". Do you know what I mean?

I don't understand what the distinction/problem is. It's a new-in-box a la "brand new". You're really getting tripped up over semantics?

My point is this stuff is still in play in a lot of places.

Maybe it's the language barrier since I'm not a native English speaker but where I'm from the phrase "brand new" means something different, it means something that just came onto the market very recently, not something that came on the market 10+ years ago but was never opened from the packaging. That's no longer means "brand new", it means "old but never used/opened". Very different things.

So when you tell me "brand new 32 bit Celeron" it is understood as "just came onto the market".

Am I right or wrong with this understanding?

>My point is this stuff is still in play in a lot of places.

I spent ~15 years in embedded and can't concur on the "still in play in a lot of places" part, but I'm not denying some users can't still exists out there, however I'm sure we can probably count them on very few fingers since Intel's 32 bit Embedded chips never had much traction to begin with.

I've never understood 'brand new' to imply anything about freshness. But according to Mirriam-Webster it means both in different, but very similar, contexts.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brand-new

The distinction in English might be more in "new" versus "used". And yes, that is inconsistent, you would think "new" versus "old" and "used" versus "unused". But alas :)

The term in this case is "new old stock:"

As in, a product that was manufactured, kept in its original packaging, and "unopened and unused".

(Although there's some allowances for the vendor to test because you don't want to buy something DOA.)

(Although I won't get too angry for someone saying "brand new." "New old stock" is kind of an obscure term that you don't come across unless you're the kind of person who cares about that kind of thing.)

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