Intel: A Bug and a Pro – By Bradford Morgan White

By 1994, Intel had managed to capture about 75% of the microprocessor market for personal computers. The company had also found its way into automobiles, industrial controls, telecommunications equipment, and supercomputers. The Intel x86 architecture had propelled the company to these immense heights, and they’d established a cadence of releases in that CPU line of roughly four years. The investment that both individuals and companies had made in hardware and software for the architecture was measured in billions. While the Pentium had been announced on the 22nd of March in 1993, systems built around the Pentium were announced on the 17th of May in 1993, and volume shipments didn’t occur until later in the year. The Pentium’s 60MHz variant could deliver 100 million instructions per second with the Dhrystone 1.1 benchmark while the 66MHz variant bumped that to 112MIPS. These were the first x86 chips to be capable of this kind of performance, and they nearly doubled the performance of ... Read full article.