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."

Comments

other sites:

[RainbowSix]

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.

Good link from the Inq.

[plopez]

Got this from the 'Link of the Day' from "The Inquirer". A good comparison of various architectures.

http://www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/s5.html# AL PHA

Author has "no idea what was responsible for name"

[crimson_alligator]

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.

Geek History

[killdashnine]

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!

Re:Author has "no idea what was responsible for na

[the real darkskye]

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

Re:Where did the name come from?

[mirko]

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.

Re:My First Pentium.

[Alien Being]

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.

Pentium history minus nasty things?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a complete history as it didn't mentioned:

- 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 /. article about MS employee cracking AltaVista computers.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[Polkyb]

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.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[robslimo]

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.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[filledwithloathing]

Wow. Thank You. I hads no idea I had one company to hate for all these pseudo-real sounding gibberish names:

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.

Re:Intel_Dominance == Smarter_Marketing

[Slime-dogg]

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.