What you need to know
- Intel will stop selling its 9th Gen Intel processors in 2021.
- General customers won't be able to buy 9th Gen chips after June 2021.
- All 9th Gen Intel chips that are set to reach end-of-life will stop shipping by December 2021.
9th Gen Intel processors will stop being sold in 2021. Intel sent out a Product Notification Change (via PCWorld) that outlines the phased plan for when the 9th generation of Intel chips will stop being sold. General customers will stop being able to purchase the chips in June 2021, and the final shipments of any of the 9th Gen chips that reach end-of-life will ship by December 24, 2021.
A wide range of 9th Gen Intel processors will reach end-of-life and stop shipping in 2021, including the Intel Core i9-9900K, many Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 variants, as well as many Pentium and Celeron processors. Quite a few of the best Windows laptops from the last two years featured 9th Gen Intel processors. Now, most of the best Windows PC run on 11th Gen Intel processors.
Processors reaching the end-of-life state is standard practice. Intel wants people to move on to newer and better processors, so an end date has to come at some point. Intel stopping the sale of 9th Gen processors doesn't affect any processors already out in the world. If you're on an older processor and your PC is still working well, you can happily keep using it for as long as you'd like.
If you are on the hunt for a new CPU, you may want to wait until the beginning of next year when Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop CPUs go on sale.
