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."

Re:My First Pentium.

[millwall]

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.

Re:Dusty

[WormholeFiend]

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

You should see some of the "text" documents that come across my desk... full of craptastic inserted art, embedded graphics, and so on.

I'm using a P4 at work right now, and when I had a PII, I remember having to extract all the text content just to be able to work on it, and copy-paste it back into the graphically enhanced version.

figuring "out of order" dependencies

[kisrael]

Is there any way of "easily" understanding how a chip handles out of order dependcies? I've done some 6502 programming (Atari 2600) but the idea seems pretty amazing to me...I guess each instruction can only affect a certain # of registers and memory locations, and if another instruction doesn't rely on those, it's ok to run it prematurely, before the the first instruction...

Well, maybe I've answered my own question, but it seems pretty amazing that you can get improved performance with that, and not having to rollback all the time.

Re:Does it mention...

[Pharmboy]

I particularly liked how the author continually said how a more complete article would be better, for every topic, and how he had written such articles in the past, but provided no links. I just love articles that sum up other articles in vague terms, without any links. That was as informative as watching an Intel TV commercial.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[Cutriss]

Well, obviously, the name means "five", right?

Basically, Intel wanted something they could trademark, because their legal team had told them that "586" wasn't trademarkable any more than 486 was, and Intel wanted a way to distinguish themselves from AMD and Cyrix.

Re:Explosions and fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Been there, done that. I write it off as the cost of learning -- paying the "street" tuition. Someone who has never ever buggered a piece of hardware has never built anything.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[jemnery]

I Don't know who it was, but the reason was that although the next logical name was "585", you can't trademark a number, so they called it Pentium instead (the "pent---" relates to the 5 in 586).

Quake

[Richard W.M. Jones]

The article neglects to remember the killer app for the Pentium - namely Quake 1. It was specifically optimized for the Pentium 1, and I remember it ran much much faster on a 66 MHz Pentium than on a 100 MHz 486 DX-4.

Rich.

Paperweight? Not necessarily

[SpooForBrains]

My firewall/nat/webserver/voice chat server is comprised of an AMD K6 166 running SuSE 7.2, and has been merrily running disklessly since it was installed more than a year ago.

Re:Pentium Pro

[Solosoft]

I can think about a few reasons

- Expensive
- Intergrated Cache = Expensive Updating
- Too Fucking Hot (I run a Dual PPro and I can't keep this fucker cool even with 5 80mm Case Fans)

Although it did have some good things

- Intergrated Cache = Speedy
- 60 - 66MHz Bus
- Full Speed Bus (unlike the PII)
- Able to run the PII Overdrive and 533MHz Celery's if you got the kit
- Able to run Dual CPU and Quad CPU easy


There is prolly more reasons ... but this is what I know from reading various sources

Re:Very Brief History

[Trixter]

God, yes. I always wonder what would have happened if IBM went with their original idea to go with a Motorola 68000, a true 32-bit CPU with actual registers, as opposed to "Moe, Larry and Curly" (ax, bx, dx) that x86 coders have had to deal with for far too long.

The article is too negative and lacks detail

[Bender_]

The article lacks a lot of detail, especially about the Pentium I. It makes it look like the "addition of MMX" was to only enhancement of the Pentium I. Instead it went through at least two redesigns and shrinks. First from a BiCMOS based P60 and P66 to the later P75-P200 design. The "addition" of MMX brought many additional tweaks as a far improved branch prediction.

The article does also claim that the Pentium I FPU was sub par. This is not true, in fact the design gets the most out of a stack-based FPU without resorting to out-of-order exucution. The FPU of the much praised contender at that time, the 68060 was as much as three times slower due to lack of pipelining.

Some flaws in the Pentium I designs: Waste of resources for a dual read data cache, which is rarely utilized. Dog slow shift and integer multiplication as compared to motorolas offerings, but intel kept the strategy also in later CPUs.

Re:Where did the name come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the name Pentium was the result of an internal name-that-chip contest held at Intel. Two employees tied for the prize: http://www.nametrade.com/contest.html

Re:Where did the name come from?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Replace "copyright" with "trademark" and you have the right idea.