Officially Intel Pentium II had it's premiere on 7th of May 1997. Initially this processor was oddly expensive and until early 1998 there were better alternatives as AMD K6 233 and Pentium MMX 233.
At lunch there were two speeds available of PII: 233 MHz and 266 MHz. 300 Mhz variant join later during summer of 1997. Until September of 1997 the only available chip set for Pentium II was 440FX which was modified Pentium Pro chip set. It lacks modern features like SDRAM support, UDMA-33 and of course AGP port. Those lacks was solved in 440LX chipset which was officially shown at atumn 1997 and the real career of PII begins.
Pentium II processor on its cartridge (called SECC-1) had clear identification of date code when it was produced. On top view in second row, second digit mean year code (7- 1997, 8- 1998, 9 -1999, 0 - 2000 - but I had never seen 0) and the third and forth digit is week of the year. For example R7380547 means that it was produced in 1997 at 38 week so it was somewhere between 15 September 1997 and 21 September 1997.
While looking for Pentium II on Ebay and Internet you can mainly find 1998 and 1999 chips. 1997 are rare and even rarer are those made before September of 1997 (when the 440LX chip set was lunched).
My target was to find chips with date code before 736 (1997 36th week). While I was looking for it on Ebay I find out that mayor part of 1997 PII's have printed "Philippines" as its assembly place, but also the earliest processor what I had found didn't have any production country origin information, only"A4" code in place of Malay, Philippines, Ireland, Costa Rica.
So the earliest what I found on Ebay and Internet was:
713 (24-30 day of March 1997) month before Pentium II premiere
SL264 OEM 233 MHz variant.
Heat-sink and label looks like it came from IBM Aptiva 300XL.
No Production location (A4).
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714 (31 day of March to 6 of April 1997) month before Pentium II premiere
SL265 OEM 266 MHz variant.
Heat-sink with unknown style.
No Production location (A4).
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719 (5-11 day of May 1997) time of Pentium II premiere
SL264 OEM 233 MHz variant.
Heat-sink looks like it came from IBM Aptiva 300XL.
No Production location (A4).
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724 (9-15 day of June 1997) time of Pentium II 300 MHz premiere
SL28R OEM 300 MHz variant.
Photo source is Vogons.org.
EC in Part number means ECC memory compatible, so the processor came from server.
No Production location (A4).
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725 (16-22 day of June 1997)
SL265 OEM 266 MHz variant.
Heat-sink looks like it came from DELL Dimension XPS H266.
Production location Philippines.
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726 (23-29 day of June 1997)
SL264 OEM 233 MHz variant.
Heat-sink with unknown style.
No Production location (A4).
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728 (7-13 day of July 1997)
SL268 OEM 233 MHz variant.
Heat-sink with unknown style.
EC in Part number means ECC memory compatible, so the processor came from server.
Production location Philippines.
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730 (21-27 day of July 1997)
SL28K BOX 233 MHz variant.
No Production location (A4).
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737 (8-14 day of September 1997)
SL28R OEM 300 MHz variant.
Heat-sink with unknown style.
No Production location (A4), it is the newest CPU what i found without country of origin.
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