This was certainly a good read. Whatever way this story ends, these Tillamook chips couldn't have ended up in better hands.
I am sure that if anyone will take the initiative to bring these back to life, it will be Sphere478.
Also, Intel absolutely intentionally artifically limited the Tillamook cores. They knew that many users would rather stay on the Socket 7 platform, and not buy into the Pentium II upgrade route.
They also knew that some users who were willing to stay on the Socket 7 platform, would ONLY do so if they could continue to use an Intel CPU.
In other words they chose to limit this product line so that people would not only buy their next shiny CPU, but also so that people would abandon the old platform that supported competitors products.
Sound business decision, if somewhat crappy in practice.
I've no doubt that the average Tillamook would scale very nicely to 400Mhz+, given the correct motherboard. Probably nearly all of them would.