It’s probably mostly legacy systems for things like industrial automation.
You can actually still buy industrial motherboards with ISA and PCI slots, for both older CPUs (like the Pentium 4) and newer CPUs (like modern-ish Core i3/i5/i7). There’s also clone CPUs that behave the same as older ones.
A lot of industrial systems are big, expensive, last a long time, and were designed for use with particular hardware, which is why there’s a pretty decent market for clones of old hardware.
Having said that… I’m not sure they’d use a newer operating system on these systems. The OS they run is likely 20 years old too. So… To answer your question, I’m not sure. Retro hardware enthusiasts tend to use an OS from the same time period.
I have a Pentium 4 line PC that I use for work. It’s actually a Xeon but same architecture. It has the only board I could find with USB 3 and SATA 3. Thing is a beast. Threw a 970 in it for a while while I didn’t have a gaming pc, and I had no problems playing (2017) contemporary games at 1080p60 in almost all cases.
I still use it as my repo for schematics and as the body to my over desk displays. I’ll probably keep it for another few years at least. It works great.
Aside from bragging rights… is there a reason why someone would still be working on a Pentium 4?
It’s probably mostly legacy systems for things like industrial automation.
You can actually still buy industrial motherboards with ISA and PCI slots, for both older CPUs (like the Pentium 4) and newer CPUs (like modern-ish Core i3/i5/i7). There’s also clone CPUs that behave the same as older ones.
A lot of industrial systems are big, expensive, last a long time, and were designed for use with particular hardware, which is why there’s a pretty decent market for clones of old hardware.
Having said that… I’m not sure they’d use a newer operating system on these systems. The OS they run is likely 20 years old too. So… To answer your question, I’m not sure. Retro hardware enthusiasts tend to use an OS from the same time period.
I have a Pentium 4 line PC that I use for work. It’s actually a Xeon but same architecture. It has the only board I could find with USB 3 and SATA 3. Thing is a beast. Threw a 970 in it for a while while I didn’t have a gaming pc, and I had no problems playing (2017) contemporary games at 1080p60 in almost all cases.
I still use it as my repo for schematics and as the body to my over desk displays. I’ll probably keep it for another few years at least. It works great.