Pure focused cruelty, or complete incompetence.

You know they've got at least 10x the server cost being wasted by old emails and stuff like that which could be more sensibly purged instead of customer reference documents.

Perhaps it's an anti-recycling effort against those who would otherwise keep running these old processors which once played a respectable key part in Intel's progress.

After digital files first became available for electronic components, there has never been any good excuse for them to go out-of-print after that.

It's incompetence because Intel should have learned from the Itanium days that their core value proposition is backwards compatibility. There is no logical reason to erase your history of success.

They probably laid off whoever championed for Ark when it came up at meetings, and then later shut it down and redirected it when it came up in a requests/month report.

A charitable explanation could be - they intend to reuse the numbering scheme and don't want confusion in search results

That's the most reasonable and most likely the reason

If it isn't just some error

That doesn't make sense unless they're going to release a "Core 2 Duo 8400" at some point. Maybe the i5 750 but I suspect they could have added a generational notice to the ark page and be done with it.

There wouldn't be a clash because they're on "Core Ultra" now.

But but Intel is sooo open source friendly.

Turns out like every corporation, they have both sides.

What does open source have to do with this?

That’s a really long stretch there.

Who, when creating new OSes focuses on really old, consumer, nothing unusual hardware?

Second, for compilers you have projects like LLVM that's like a framework for building compilers where those companies like Intel, AMD, Samsung, etc contribute.

Not everyone has the opportunity to only have new computers, especially in many third world countries.

LLVM shouldn't turn into compiler monoculture.