What is Pentium?
| PROCESSOR SPECIFICATIONS | ||
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| Manufacturer: | Intel | |
| Model: | Pentium | |
| Year: | 1993 | |
| Transistors: | 3,100,000 | |
| Microns: | 0.8µ | |
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By this time, the Intel 486 was entrenched into the market. Also, people were used to the traditional 80x86 naming scheme. Intel was busy working on its next generation of processor. It was not to be called the 80586, though. There were some legal issues surrounding the ability for Intel to trademark the numbers 80586. So, instead, Intel changed the name of the processor to the Pentium, a name they could easily trademark. They released the Pentium in 1993. The original Pentium performed at 60 MHz and 100 MIPS. Also called the "P5" or "P54", the chip contained 3.21 million transistors and worked on the 32-bit address bus (same as the 486 chip). It has a 64-bit external data bus which could operate at roughly twice the speed of the 486. The Pentium family includes the 60/66/75/90/100/120/133/150/166/200 MHz clock speeds. The original 60/66 MHz versions operated on the Socket 4 setup, while all of the remaining versions operated on the Socket 7 motherboards. Some of the chips (75MHz - 133MHz) could operate on Socket 5 motherboards as well. Pentium is compatible with all of the older operating systems including DOS, Windows 3.1, Unix, and OS/2. Its superscalar design can execute two instructions per clock cycle. The two separate 8K caches (code cache and data cache) and the pipelined floating point unit increase its performance beyond the x86 chips. It had the SL power management features of the i486SL, but the capability was much improved. It has 273 pins that connect it to the motherboards. Internally, though, its really two 32-bit chips chained together that split the work. The first Pentium chips operated at 5 volts and thus operated rather hotly. Starting at the 100MHz version, the requirement was reduced to 3.3 volts. Starting at the 75MHz version, the chip also supported Symmetric Dual Processing, meaning you could use two Pentiums side by side in the same system. The Pentium stayed around a long time. It was released in many different speeds as well as different flavors. In fact, Intel implemented an "s-spec" rating which is marked on each Pentium CPU which tells the owner some key data about the processor in order to make sure they have their motherboards set correctly. There were just so many different Pentiums out there that it became hard to tell. |
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