GoKawiil33 years ago today, the Pentium lineage began, shaping decades of personal computing to come. The Pentium was Intel’s first superscalar design, an architectural feature that enabled the execution of multiple instructions per cycle. This would give it a boost in performance beyond its predecessor(s) despite the pedestrian sounding launch SKU clocks. Intel’s first P5/i586 architecture chips were the Pentium 60 and Pentium 66.
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.
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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 30th 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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