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Comments (87)

• xbar
  Nice nostalgic piece. I have a lot of fond "favorite chip" memories from that era.Not to be too pedantic, I would contend that at the time, it was pretty clear to enthusiast what the differences were. Everyone in the industry was paying attention to 486s and the cost of a genuine intel chip. The FDIV bug was on every Evening News for weeks. AMD and Cyrix vs intel debates were common.I agree that it is not obvious now that Pentium came after 486, but at the time, it was clear.
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  sombragris
  I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.
• theodorethomas
  I remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/30 for her tourist guidebook work. She later upgraded to a 6100 PowerMac "pizza-box", various iMacs, G3/G4/G5, whereas I saved a quad-200MHz PentiumPro monster (Compaq Professional Workstation 8000, tricked up to 3GB RAM) from the skip. I regret taking that to the recycling centre many years later.
• 1970-01-01
  That's quite a lot of words to say "Pentium"Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.
• jimt1234
  Here's the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
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  specproc
  I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
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  stevefan1999
  Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium.But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
• tycoon666
  The AMD 5x86 was the first Machine i ran Linux on
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  wodenokoto
  Something something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium
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  montroser
  I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.
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  rob74
  Another interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.
• bluedino
  The worst part about the 486 name was all the varieties, an uninformed consumer could get a real lemon.The author links to an example:https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a...You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.
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  thisisidiotic
  Yea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."
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  ricardo81
  Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU
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  Anonasty
  The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.
• bluedino
  > The original Pentium-branded CPU topped out at 200 MHz in the end, and the Pentium MMX-branded CPU reached 233 MHz.There was a mobile 266MHz Pentium MMX, TillamookAnd it appears there was a 300MHz version according to Wikipedia.
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  nobleach
  I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.
• sehugg
  I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.
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  irusensei
  Fun fact: Bonnel Atoms (D510 etc) were not affected by the meltdown vulnerability that plagued every Pentium processor since the 1995 Pentiums. These Atoms use purely in-order execution engines which kinda makes them supercharged 486s.
• chinathrow
  Booting up a Pentium after having used a 486 for years was like driving on the high way compared to riding a toddler bike on a foot trail.
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  icedchai
  This makes me feel old. I remember getting a 486 (DX4/100) in mid-1994, the Pentium was still too expensive!
• bentt
  Cool writeup. I never knew they moved to the name Pentium over 586 simply for trademark ability.
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  rickcarlino
  I am almost 40 and only now realizing “pent”ium came after “4”86.
• Zardoz84
  They add 100 to the 486, but they got 585.99999999.... so they called it Pentium xD
• guenthert
  Well pentiums of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Pentiums