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Intel's Pentium Chip Turns 20 Today
girlmad writes "Intel's Pentium processor was launched 20 years ago today, a move that led to the firm becoming the dominant supplier of computer chips across the globe. This article has some original iComp benchmark scores, rating the 66MHz Pentium at a heady 565, compared with 297 for the 66MHz 486DX2, which was the fastest chip available prior to the Pentium launch."
The rest of us made do with 60MHz versions.
It really had to hurt Intel to have to back down on clock speeds for once. They didn't do that again until NetBurst burst.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
fdiv bug
The 66MHz original Pentium. What a beast.
It ran on a full TTL +5V. So it sucked down power. Lots of power. I've disassembled first generation Pentium chips, removing the golden cover that protects the die beneath. The die is HUGE! Much bigger than any current production CPU.
In fact, the early models produced so much heat that we boggled at the big fans needed to cool them! It was one of the first Intel x86 chips that REQUIRED a fan for cooling. We used to run our 486DX2/66 and below fanless and they worked great.
All this for only less than twice the performance, at three times the cost.
The vast majority of us skipped the first generation Pentium, instead going for more affordable chips as the i486DX4/100 and the Am5x86/133, which was RIDICULOUSLY popular for several years! In fact, the latter was faster than a Pentium 75MHz for anything that didn't require the FPU. And not much needed the FPU back then.
Then of course we laughed our asses off when the FDIV flaw became known. Clearly the Pentium was the #0.9999999998855 processor on the market!
Ahh, memories.
This article has some original iComp benchmark scores, rating the 66MHz Pentium at a heady 565, compared with 297 for the 66MHz 486DX2, which was the fastest chip available prior to the Pentium launch.
I'm amazed by these scores. I remember having a fairly fast 486 DX4 @ ~100 MHz (probably by Cyrix or AMD perhaps) at the time the Pentiums started to become popular. I got the impression that a Pentium 66 or 75 would actually be a downgrade for me, but maybe that hadn't been the case.
I eventually switched when the Pentium Overdrive came out, so I could keep my 486 mainboard but still have a faster Pentium chip in my machine. That was a pretty sweet deal.
I can't believe this is all 20 years ago, it feels like only yesterday.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
From his royal Weirdness...
All About the Pentiums
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
The Pentium MMX was really popular with gamers. I actually skipped the Pentium II because AMD's K6 was imho a much better deal. I only switched back to Intel when the Pentium III came out.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I had a 486SX/25... overclocked to 33MHz!
I was a total badass. You can feel the badassery radiating from my body! Mwahahaha.
My dad had a 486 SX while I had a mere 386... but it was a DX running at 40 MHz, so it was actually better for playing Doom! Muahahaha.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I had a machine with one of those Pentium-83 Overdrives that plugged into an SX-33's socket. Unfortunately this computer didn't have any secondary SRAM cache so it ran approximately like a DX2-66.
Back in the day, it took about 90 minutes to compile a 2.0.36 kernel, but it ran Duke3D and Descent well (dual boot).
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E pluribus sanguinem
A 486SX 25? Are you made of money!? My Tandy 1000SX is just fine for playing Police Quest 2!
I remember seeing them but I can't track down the official release.
Well you wanted the EGA Graphics.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jwg4mbGL4JE#t=36s
That's way too fast for Police Quest 2. Hell, that's probably too fast for Wing Commander. But not fast enough for DOOM, at least for someone who is used to smooth frame rates on modern FPS. I find DOOM barely playable on my 486dx2/66 with 256k cache. Gets around 25fps.
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If you performed a calculation that took a week to complete on a modern Core i7 2600k, you'd still be waiting for your Pentium 1 to finish the same calculation even with a 20 year head start!
Source
I feel so old now :(
There's a nice New Yorker podcast from a couple of years ago that discusses what went into picking the name: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/10/03/111003on_audio_colapinto . It was done by Lexicon Branding, who actually write code to break up words into phonems and then remix those sounds into new words. The program spits out lists of candidates that are then vetted by the linguists at Lexicon. I found it a really interesting discussion.
Um... no. The pentiums were a major leap because that was when they moved to superscalar execution. They were great processors.
I assume you're referring to the name "Pentium" instead of calling it the 586, which was done because Intel lost a lawsuit and courts ruled they couldn't copyright numbers.
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Back in the day, most engineers wish IBM had gone with motorollas 68000 rather than the address hobbled 8086 series. Oh how we hated paging 640k hell.
46137
MHz to MHz, the PPCs and Pentiums were at par. And what hurt the PPC was the fact that Apple's OS for that was System 7, which was a cooperative multitasking system, and Apple fell way behind Microsoft while developing Copland. The rest is history.
Was the calculation done on a Pentium?
(Sorry, had to make the obvious joke.)
If 66 MHz was state of the art in 1993 and Moore's Law predicts a doubling of density (effectively clock rate) every 18 months, then 20 years/1.5 years = 13.3. So clock rates should be 2^13.3 times faster today, about 10,000x, or 66 MHz x 10,000 = 6.6 GHz, which is actually twice as fast as today's max of 3.2 GHz.
Given that 3.2 GHz Pentiums arrived on the market about 10 years ago (2002) but haven't moved since, it seems Moore's Law was clearly pessimistic for the Pentium's first 10 years and wildly optimistic for the last 10.
Of course the introduction of multicores Pentiums was a hack borne of desperation. The amount of speedup per app from a 2013 quad core Sandy Bridge @ 2.5 GHz over a 2002 P6 @ 3.2 GHz is... Ugh.
Has the speedup of the Pentium really gone negative? Has multicore-ing it caused the demerits of Amdahl's Law to finally overtake the merits of Moore's Law?
You've got it Amdahl's vs Moore and it has always been there. Density is roughly doubling as per Moore. Amdahl pretty much means we have a limited opportunity to find more work to parallelize so we need to find more different things to do. You won't be able to parallelize the heck out of everything if for no other reason than some logic is inherently serial and waiting on slower I/O. So They split off to multicore but still doesn't create more parallel work. At some point silly things like predictive branching or computing both sides of a branch ahead of time and then keeping the winner only gets you so far especially since in the first case you can be wrong sometimes, and the second you are guaranteed that you won't need one side of the calculation (so you are creating extra work just to be sure you have the result when needed and to avoid idle hardware).
The Pentium and its successors were the first computer chips designed by the marketing department rather than the engineering department!
Uh, you misspelled 'Altivec' up there.
I had a 486DX33. I was unintentionally badass for quite awhile because I had the AT-bus multiplier set wrong on my motherboard for a long, long time. I don't remember the exact figure, but I was running the clock on the IO channel about 33% faster. I didn't notice it until I eventually plugged in a card that wouldn't run faster than the design and figured out why.
the 486 dx4/120. I loved that processor.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
You must mean trademark.
In fact, clock rate and density have grown inseparable. Compare these plots of Clock speed (p. 61) with Moore's Law (p.67):
The two curves are doppelgangers.
Clock rates aren't a measurement of density or processing ability. Moore's 'law' is that the number of transistors that can be (and are being) stuffed onto chips doubles approximately every 18 months.
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66Mhz x 10,000. = 660,000Mhz = 660Ghz
Not that Moores law predicted clock speeds.
Yikes. Time for me to repeat 6th grade math.
As to whether Moore's Law fails to predict clock rate, I'm not so sure. In the first decade of the Pentium, ML accurately predicted clock rate within 2X. (Starting at 66 MHz, rising 2x each 1.5 years, that's 10/1.5 = 6.66, or 2^6.66, or 100x, or 66 MHz x 100x = 6.6 GHz, which is only 2x larger than life. That's pretty accurate, IMHO.
But Moore's Law fails to predict clock rates of the Pentium only during the past decade, where at 660 GHz, its estimate is 200x too large. Clearly the difference between those two decades reveals a sea change in the life of the Pentium (and CMOS in general).
The Pentium 4 "netburst" bullshit was the marketing chip. Maybe the Pentium 2 as well, they didn't seem all that much faster. The current Core idea is the successor to the 386/Pentium Pro/Pentium III line of chips.
Jesus. I remember when I started high school, they had just replaced some old big iron Unix machine (complete with glassed in room and separate HVAC and all that 1980s bling) with a 486 and a serial port multiplexer. And blew it away in performance. The thing easily supported a room full of 30 terminals all compiling our simple C (or Pascal or BASIC) programs. It really is sort of amazing how much computing power we "waste" with our stupid GUIs.
Moore's law specifies transistor density, and clock speed is just a side effect. Also, a Core i7 probably outperforms whatever a Pentium 6.6gHz would be.
I ember I had got a 386sx33 in 1993 and used that for all the programming until 2004 when I upgraded to k6 amd
Nope, I'm using a VLB Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM T. I'm just spoiled by getting 60FPS on my modern machine.
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