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The History Of Pentium
yootje writes "ArsTechnica is running a story about the history of the Pentium processor. It starts with the original Pentium back in 1993, but it also handles the Pentium II and III. The article goes deep about how the processors are designed and work."
Here are some other cool CPU reference sites:
www.sandpile.org
Sandpile lists electrical specs for lots of CPUs and has links to lots of CPU documents.
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
Lots of info here about pinouts and electrical specs. I like this one because it lists the initial selling price for the CPUs as well.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Got this from the 'Link of the Day' from "The Inquirer". A good comparison of various architectures.
# AL PHA
http://www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/s5.html
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The reason Intel broke with tradition and gave this chip a non-numeric name is because numbers cannot be copyrighted/trademarked.
Anyone could sell a "586 Chip": competitive chip makers like AMD and Doritos.
They switched to Pentium so nobody else could use the name.
Ahhh, ArsTechnica ... what a refreshing way to start a Monday than to relive my geek heritage. I still have my first Pentium computer in my closet at home. Large paperweight, I presume, but it may still run Linux. I've been thinking of making a wall-mounted collection of all my used processors for posterity.
I could stand to forget about Win95 though ... (shudders). Nothing worse than having to reformat one's hard drive every 3-6 months!
windows 1.0 was released in 1985
Author also seems to believe that the P1 went up to 300Mhz, maybe with N2 cooling but I was under the impression it stopped at 233Mhz, with AMD taking SuperSocket 7 speeds to the 500Mhz mark
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
IIRC, another opponent(was it NexGEN ?) had issued a blah-586.
That's why they changed its name from i586 to that less numeral one.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
An alternate universe? Why, which one are you from?
according to this page... The development was delayed several times, however, and the Windows 1.0 hit the store shelves in November 1985. The selection of applications was sparse, however, and Windows sales were modest.
It's not a complete history as it didn't mentioned:
/. article about MS employee cracking AltaVista computers.
- How Intel handle the Pentium bug. When the FP bug surfaced, Intel grudgingly agreed to replace Pentium chips if it affected a user significantly. My fellow grad student found out the hard way that his Pentium 90MHz he bragged about yielded wrong results in Matlab for his project. He complained to Intel and Intel wouldn't replace it since it was not important. He was a grad student in an engineering school... how was it NOT important to get accurate results? It took a long time and persistence and a threat to complain to BBB to get it replaced. I never trust Intel since.
- Intel v. DEC. The article made it sound as all the architectural "innovations" in Pentium were the result of Intel's brilliance. What about the 10 patent infringements from Alpha that prompted DEC to sue Intel? There was a thread of this in another
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3
I've found this highly dependant on the input bit rate. With a 120MHz processor, I used to be able to play up to 160kb/s flawlessly, but anything over that would occasionally stutter, and 256kb/s was unplayable.
You need something running at 100Mhz to encode an MP3 in less time than it takes to play it.
What encoder are you using? I use LAME, and that seems to need ~200MHz to encode in real time.
You need something running at 1Ghz to encode video on the fly.
Again: what encoder are you using? With TMPGEnc Plus encoding mpeg2 with the default setting for the motion search precision, performance on the aforementioned celeron suggests I'd need about 1.6 - 2GHz to get it up to real time (for high quality PAL DVD -- should be about the same for NTSC DVD, which has lower resolution but higher frame rate).
I was under the impression that Intel tried to copyright "586" and lost the case
They then decided to call it by a name that they could copyright.
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Lexicon Branding came up with the name as well as "Swiffer," "PowerBook" and others.
It's a science, you see? Or at least a niche business.
How fast is a Pentium 530? 360? 720?
At least AMD's Model Numbers had some grounding in the real world. It said how fast the processor ran. By 'fast' I mean in terms of processing data, not how fast its little legs were running.
AMD is number two simply because they are a fraction of the size of Intel, and have only been competing with them decently in the last 5 years, hardly enough time to get significant marketshare from an incumbent in the marketplace.
Intel were very lucky in the 80's - their processor was chosen for the system that went on to become the number one system by far. That, and the competitors at the time simply couldn't compete against PCs and clones thereof and died out (e.g., Amiga) or were marginalised (Macintosh).
Celeron, Xeon, pa1mOne, Sprint Vision, OnStar, Toyota Scion, Dasani, Febreeze, HP Pavilion. Saturn VUE, Meridia, Zyprexa, etc.
I don't know half the brands on this page but they all make me want to puke. Page of Jibba Jabba.
Are you a VF grad? Check out the VFMA Alumni Forums VFMA Alumni Forum
The P1 did go up to 300MHz, but it was only sold in mobile forms, for laptops and what-not.
All hail Weird Al Yankovic
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The difference between the 486DX and 486SX was that the SX didn't have a coprocessor. The difference between the 386DX and 386SX was that the SX had a narrower (slower) 16-bit external data path.
The upgrade to the 486SX was called the 487SX, which was actually a full 486DX in a different package. The 387 was just a floating-point processor.
<OT>
I had a friend who bought a Compaq 386 in 1988 to use as a Netware print server for his business. I think it cost $15k, but of course it had 2 full-height 1 GB SCSI disks, 16 MB of RAM, 3 expensive parallel ports and ethernet with a built-in 10base2 transceiver. Also a 387 for some reason. Bought it from him for $10 ten years later.
</OT>
Hands in my pocket
You can't trademark numbers. AMD, Cyrix, NexGen, and several others had released souped-up 486es and labelled them as "586". Intel didn't like this, so they named their "586" as Pentium, trademarked it, then refused to license the trademark to their competitors. Thus, you could buy an AMD 586, IBM 586, Cyrix 586, NexGen 5x86, or Intel Pentium.
Later, when Intel licensed the Pentium bus or chipset or whatever to AMD and company and they started to produce Socket 7 compatible CPUs, things got even more confusing. Cyrix had the 6x86, AMD had the 586 and K6, NexGen had the 5x86 and the K5, Intel had the Pentium, IBM had the 586 and some other chip. WinChip had the C6. Gone were the days of everything being named the same. No longer could you say "I'm running a 486" and not care about who made it.
No.
The 2400 is indicative of a T-Bird Athlon running at 2.4 GHz. They came out with the XP's (mustang, palamino, etc) immediately after the Thunderbirds, which is when they ditched the MHz / GHz display.
For all purposes, and 1.2 GHz T-Bird was capable of performing as fast as a 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4, I believe. An Athlon 2400XP will outperform a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz, unless the programs are compiled for SSE2 usage. If there's one thing that is cool, it's the sheer bandwidth of the Pentium 4 with SSE2. That's why Intel was recommending RAMBUS earlier, because the 800Mhz RIMMs would provide the bandwidth that the Pentium 4 required.
So, for comparison... a 2400XP will outperform a Pentium 4 2.4 in normal x86 integer and floating point math. It will not when the Pentium 4 is running SSE2 floating point math.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Except the 386 had ZERO on-board cache, and wasn't available with an on-board copro like the 486, and both the 386 and the 486 had a 32-bit data bus (or a 16-bit if you got a 386SX or 486SLC), and the Pentium had a longer pipeline, and I can go on and on, but the Pentium was HARDLY a 486QLC (64-bit bus 486 - no, none existed).
1. P-Pro wasn't just 256/512 there were 1mb and 2mb versions.
2. P-3 was initially off-chip L2 but later went to on-chip L2.
3. P-2 was available up to 333MHz on the desktop end and 400MHz on the laptop end.
4. It was implied that the SECC cartridge was just on the P-2, the P-3 also used a SECC cartridge and continued even after Socket 370 was standardized.
5. The author said that the P-3 brought the Bunny Suits, no that was the P-2. The P-3 brought us the sock monkey, robot, and even the blue man group.