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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."
F00FC7C8 ?
I remember exploding many systems running many OSes with that...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Really, who came up with the name "Pentium"?
It makes me feel old that they now have a histroy for things I was around for the beginning of.
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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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.
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
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It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
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.
You lucky BASTARD, all we had was a 486SX-33.
Anyone else but me feel old when they read a comment like this? To me 33Mhz still feels like yesterday, not like some ancient processor speed.
I guess I'm the one getting ancient here.
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
[nostalgia]
... when I used to lust, in equal measures, for the hottest girl in my class and the soon-to-be-launched Pentium!!
[/nostalgia]
*sigh*
I had only been in the PC-building business for a few months when the Pentiums came out. I was always really nonchalant when it came to building computers and was certainly not gentle. However, everything I had built up to that point either had the CPU soldered onto the motherboard or someone else had done it because I had never seen a separate CPU.
When the first Pentium-based system arrived at my workstation to build I mounted the motherboard to the case and then put the CPU in place, but it didn't go in very well. I pulled it out and bent the pins back into place and put it in again. It felt like it went in okay.
I took the little arm thing and pulled down to secure it in place and heard a sound, but I thought it was okay... I had never done this before.
I put in the cards, drives and memory and fired the system up... blank screen and then... POP!!! and some smoke.
I didn't realize the CPU had a dot that corresponded with a notched corner indicating how to put the thing into place. From then on I started paying attention to things like that.
The Pentium made me mature as a technician... for about a week; then it was a contest to see how far we could launch them in the air. (kidding)
"I'm a karate man. Karate mans bleed on the inside."
Rich.
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