Dictionary of Computers - Pentium

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Microprocessor produced by Intel in 1993. The Pentium followed on from the 486 processor and would have been called the 586, but Intel wanted to distinguish its processor from those of rival chip manufacturers, and was unable to register numbers as a trademark. The Pentium family was extended by the Pentium Pro in 1995 and the Pentium II in 1997, and also by the addition of MMX instructions in 1996. All members of the family are 32-bit chips with 64-bit data buses for faster access to memory and the PCI expansion bus. The Pentium III, running at 1.0 GHz, was released in 2000, and a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 in 2001.

The original Pentium had about 3.1 million transistors, the Pentium Pro about 5.5 million, and the Pentium II about 7.5 million. The slowest Pentium ran at 60 MHz, but in 1997 speeds reached 300 MHz in PCs and 450 MHz under laboratory conditions. By 2006, Intel was manufacturing Pentium 4-Extreme Edition chips with speeds of up to 3.473 GHz. The Pentium M forms part of Intel's Centrino mobile technology, which was introduced in March 2003.

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