Pentium n. The name given to Intel's P5 chip, the successor to the
80486. The name was chosen because of difficulties Intel had in
trademarking a number. It suggests the number five (implying 586) while
(according to Intel) conveying a meaning of strength "like titanium".
Among hackers, the plural is frequently `pentia'. See also PentagramPro.
Intel did not stick to this convention when naming its P6 processor
the Pentium Pro; many believe this is due to difficulties in selling a
chip with "hex" or "sex" in its name. Successor chips have been called
`Pentium II', `Pentium III', and `Pentium IV'.
Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)
Pentium
Intel's superscalar successor to the 486.
It has two 32-bit 486-type integer pipelines with dependency
checking. It can execute a maximum of two instructions per
cycle. It does pipelined floating-point and performs
branch prediction. It has 16 kilobytes of on-chip
cache, a 64-bit memory interface, 8 32-bit general-purpose
registers and 8 80-bit floating-point registers. It is
built from 3.1 million transistors on a 262.4 mm^2 die with
~2.3 million transistors in the core logic. Its clock rate
is 66MHz, heat dissipation is 16W, integer performance is 64.5
SPECint92, floating-point performance 56.9 SPECfp92.
It is called "Pentium" because it is the fifth in the 80x86
line. It would have been called the 80586 had a US court not
ruled that you can't trademark a number.
The successors are the Pentium Pro and Pentium II.
A floating-point division bug
(ftp://ftp.isi.edu/pub/carlton/pentium/FAQ) was discovered in
October 1994.
[Internal implementation, "Microprocessor Report" newsletter,
1993-03-29, volume 7, number 4].
[Pentium based computers, PC Magazine, 1994-01-25].
(1997-11-21)
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