Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium.
But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
If I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well.
The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.
AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its core. AMD bought NexGen and improved their RISC design for the K6 then Athlon.
Because of the branding change, history will remember the Pentium (P5). It was really the Pentium
Pro (P6) that put Intel leaps ahead on x86 microarchitecture, a lead they’d hold with only a few minor stumbles for two decades.
Bob Colwell (mentioned elsewhere ITT) wrote a fascinating technical history of the P6: The Pentium Chronicles.
The major stumble being having to cross licence AMD for the x64 opcode design thus ensuring at least two players in the field (and due to how it's going only two).
They also started to slip behind AMD in the Pentium 4/NetBurst era, but got their footing back with Core (a more direct descendant of the P6 than the Pentium 4!)
Around the same time, but I’d classify as separate stumbles.
Por qué no los dos? If "-ium" makes nerds think of an element name, and others of a premium product, all the better. I'd bet both of these interpretations were listed in the original internal marketing presentation of the name...
> but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium
some say that they tried to add 486 with 100 and the result had some numbers after the comma, that's why they named it pentium (yes, i know about the FDIV bug)
Fun fact: Bonnel Atoms (D510 etc) were not affected by the meltdown vulnerability that plagued every Pentium processor since the 1995 Pentiums. These Atoms use purely in-order execution engines which kinda makes them supercharged 486s.
Another interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.
What I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64.
Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.
Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.
If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point.
Around the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end
If this is true or not I don't know, but I worked on a project with an HP employee and we were talking about the Itanium. At some point the HP guy goes "You know we more or less designed that thing, right?"
I would tend to believe that the Itanium is an HP product, given that they've always seems more invested in the platform than Intel.
The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.
Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000.
December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.
Fun thing is with a tiny bit of manipulation you can run a P3 tualatin at 1.33ghz via a slot adapter and some pin disablement and some voltage mods (or if you had the right adapter a jumper) in a motherboard which came with a low tier P2 or even earlier. So without replacing your Asus P2B from very early 1998 well up to mid 00s with astonishing performance gains, that motherboard had a massive lifespan in the right hands. Mine is still running with a new voltage regulator to this day.
On other hand not being hopelessly outdated in a relatively short time does have perks. It is cheaper to not have to update constantly and still getting decent performance.
But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
> The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.
The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.
AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its core. AMD bought NexGen and improved their RISC design for the K6 then Athlon.
Bob Colwell (mentioned elsewhere ITT) wrote a fascinating technical history of the P6: The Pentium Chronicles.
Around the same time, but I’d classify as separate stumbles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38459128
some say that they tried to add 486 with 100 and the result had some numbers after the comma, that's why they named it pentium (yes, i know about the FDIV bug)
It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.
Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.
Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.
If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point.
Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...
But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain.
It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination.
It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.
I would tend to believe that the Itanium is an HP product, given that they've always seems more invested in the platform than Intel.
December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.
January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133
June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE).
Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.
But the time since 2020 feels much faster again. It's scary! But it's exciting.