Intel pentium

Intel® Pentium® is a family of fifth generation microprocessors with x86 architecture produced by Intel Corporation.

The first Pentium was released on March 22, 1993, with initial speeds of 60 and 66 MHz, 3,100,000 transistors, internal cache of 8 KiB for data and 8 KiB for instructions; succeeding the Intel 80486 processor. Intel did not call it 586 because it is not possible to register a mark composed only of numbers.

Pentium was also known by its code name P54C. It was marketed at speeds between 60 and 200 MHz, with bus speeds of 50, 60, and 66 MHz. The versions that included MMX instructions not only gave the user better handling of multimedia applications, such as reading DVD movies but they were offered in speeds of up to 244MHz, including a 200 MHz version and the most basic one provided a 166 MHz clock.

The appearance of this processor was carried out with an impressive economic movement, ending the competition, which until then produced equivalent processors, such as the 80386, the 80486 and its variations or even NPUs.

The following companies were affected by the appearance of the Pentium:

• Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD. He had to create his processors from scratch. This is the K5 and the K6 (These processors were baptized this way because "K" means Kriptonite, and as it is known, the Kriptonite weakens the super-hero of comics and Superman films this is consequently what made Intel to its competitors with the appearance of Pentium)
• Cyrix, which produced very good 486, was then acquired by VIA
• Harris
• LU-MATH

These last two were not very well known although their versions of high-performance processors (such as the Harris 80386) arrived late and unfortunately could not gain a foothold in the market.

Pentium had an architecture capable of executing two operations at the same time thanks to its two data pipelines of 32 bits each, one equivalent to the 486DX(u) and the other equivalent to the 486SX(u). In addition, it had a 64-bit data bus, allowing 64-bit memory access (although the processor continued to maintain 32-bit compatibility for internal operations and the registers were also 32-bit).