Intel released its first Pentium chip on this day 33 years ago, came packing 3.1 million transistors — fifth-gen x86 chip built on an 800nm process

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Intel released its first Pentium chip on this day 33 years ago, came packing 3.1 million transistors — fifth-gen x86 chip built on an 800nm process

Above you can see Intel’s official data sheet for the Pentium 60 and 66. Zoom in if you want to digest the full technical specifications.

The same team that worked on the Intel 386 and 486 would drive forward the Pentium design. Work began on the chip back in June 1989, with the development team deciding to meld RISC and CISC technology with an on-chip cache, 64-bit burst-mode external data bus, fully hardware multiplier, and dynamic branch prediction. On paper, floating point operations were another strength, outperforming the i486 FPU by between three and five times.

You may like The Intel 286 CPU was introduced on this day in 1982 AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ debuted this week in 1999 with on-die L2 cache to savage the Intel Pentium II PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon Intel had planned to launch the Pentium in September 1992, but design problems were behind a delay to March 22, 1993. Sadly, they still missed some bloopers, most notably the Pentium FDIV bug . We wrote about this infamous math bug a couple of years back, on the anniversary of its discovery (discovered October 1994).

The FDIV bug episode was the first time Intel ever had to recall CPUs. It would cost the chipmaker $475 million to recall the defective CPUs, and inflicted a long-lasting stain on its reputation. Incidentally, the 30 th anniversary year of the FDIV bug was also the year Intel acknowledged that Raptor Lake CPUs were frying themselves to death due to too much voltage.

Intel would refine the Pentium line the following year with the P54C, clocked at 75, 90, and 100MHz SKUs. In addition to the CPU clock boost they got a new 80502 FPU. These were fabbed at 600nm (later 350nm) switching from 5V to a lower ~3V core voltage, and the platform to Socket 4 to Socket 5.

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Related posts:

  1. Intel released its first Pentium chip on this day 33 years ago, came packing 3.1 million transistors — fifth-gen x86 chip built on an 800nm process
  2. AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ debuted this week in 1999 with on-die L2 cache to savage the Intel Pentium II — it also held the line against the Pentium III
  3. AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ debuted this week in 1999 with on-die L2 cache to savage the Intel Pentium II — it also held the line against the Pentium III
  4. AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ debuted this week in 1999 with on-die L2 cache to savage the Intel Pentium II — it also held the line against the Pentium III

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