Intel Pentium Processor Turns 20 Years Old
Intel Pentium 60 – Produced May 1993
On March 22nd, 1993 the Intel Pentium Processor was released to the public (so yah yesterday but hey whose counting). This was Intel’s first processor with an actual name. Turns out you cannot trademark a number, so the ‘486’ name was being used by everyone (AMD, Cyrix, TI, UMC, IBM etc). Initially known by its core name, P5, the Pentium was also the first superscaler Intel x86 processor It had dual Integer pipelines, and a single Floating point unit allowing it to issue and complete multiple instructions per clock.
The first Pentiums ran at 60 and 66MHz and were made on a CMOS 0.8micron process with 3.2 million transistors. After only a few months it was discovered that they ran particularly warm and the package was updated with a Copper-Tungsten heatspreader (gold plated).
A modern desktop processor such as the Core i7 Quad Core Ivy Bridge contain 1.4 Billion transistors on a 22nm process. The P5 still lives on in the embedded market, and in the Intel Larrabee project which is itself, an updated P54C core (supporting a few more modern features such as x86-64).
