GoKawiilCPUs didn’t have brand names, besides the manufacturer, until the 1990s. They had part numbers and clock speeds. Frequently we shortened the part numbers. The 486’s full part number was 80486. The courts wouldn’t let Intel trademark a number, so the 486 was the last CPU of its kind, raising the question: What came after 486?
The follow-up for the 486 was the Pentium, at least in Intel’s case, and it was introduced March 22, 1993. But several companies made 486 CPUs, and several of those released their own follow-ups to the 486, including AMD and Cyrix.
Intel’s Pentium CPUs
The original Pentium CPUs of the 1990s used a faster front side bus than the 486 and plugged into a different socket. Intel did sell a Pentium Overdrive CPU that plugged into a special 486 socket with an extra row of pins. This hybrid had a Pentium core, but still used the slower 486 front side bus so its performance was somewhat disappointing.
A true Pentium was about 40% faster than a 486 running at the same clock speed, and the first Pentiums ran at 60 and 66 MHz while the fastest 486 at the time also ran at 66 MHz. Intel eventually released 486 CPUs clocked at 100 MHz, but by that time, it had ramped Pentium clock speeds up to 120 and 133 MHz. The original Pentium-branded CPU topped out at 200 MHz in the end, and the Pentium MMX-branded CPU reached 233 MHz.
For about three years, Intel had this post-486 market all to itself. Had this not been the case, the Pentium FDIV bug would have been a disaster for Intel.
Why brand name was important after the 486
Intel had mixed success in stopping companies from making clones of its chips, and no success whatsoever in keeping them from using Intel’s numbering scheme to indicate their chips were functionally equivalent. That meant Intel never produced a chip it called the 80586, which would have been the logical followup to the immensely successful 80486. Intel codenamed its 486 successor the P5, and when it released it, Intel gave it the brand name of Pentium. The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.
Other companies also intended to produce 586-class CPUs. Intel’s profit margins were high enough they figured they could undercut Intel’s prices a little and still turn a reasonable profit. And for a while, they followed that naming scheme, but that wouldn’t work forever. Intel knew it, and they knew it. The result was market confusion, some of which persists to this day.
But we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. Motorola was the other major manufacturer of CPUs at the time, and Motorola didn’t have the problem of other companies making knockoffs of its CPUs. Why was Intel’s situation different?
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