Looks like the Classic client is going the way of Tabula Rasa.
To accommodate older PCs and those who prefer to run twenty clients of EVE while they run SETI@Home and ray trace while compressing HD movies, we will deliver what we refer to as “Premium Lite.” Premium Lite will only require ShaderModel 2.0 hardware, and far less texture memory than the current Premium, ensuring good framerates on older hardware.
It’ll be interesting to see how this streamlining of the low end client works with older hardware, but if they’re successful with this then it’ll be a great advantage to CCP to not have to support two completely different client architectures.
Source: Dev Blog