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The History Of Pentium

Posted by Hemos on from the get-yer-geek-on dept.

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."

2 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Where did the name come from? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Really, who came up with the name "Pentium"?

  2. Dusty by Prince+Vegeta+SSJ4 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Geez, I'm starting to feel old.

    Back in 1993

    Was that sooooo long ago? I never had an original pentium, as I usually find the cost/performance not usually worth the upgrade and I therefore usually skip a processor generation or so.

    • 8086 or was it 8088
    • Mac II (i know, it's not a PC, but it kicked ass, and even though I don't have an apple now, I still believe that they are some very nice machines)
    • 486 dx-2 66 (now that was a cool sounding name)
    • Pentium II (300 mhz)
    • Pentium 4 (1.7 & 3.2 Ghz)
    Thing is, why do most of us need all of this power? The only thing that has really driven my upgrades has been the ability to play games. Excel worked fine on a PII (even usuing features most 'business' users don't like regression analysis, formulas, etc)

    Word processors worked fine as well, in fact I miss some of the older processors that didn't try to autoformat every damned thing

    Web browsers as well

    I know there are security issues with alot of older softwares, etc, but can't they produce a fast low cost computer, w/o all of the bloat. Then everyone could afford a decent computer to do 99.9% of the things they wan't to.

    My cousin just bought a $2000 computer and all he want's to do is occasionally surf, rip mp3's and DVD's - could this be done on a pentium or pentium II platform.

    Did, I go way offtopic, it's monday.