The Intel Pentium: A quick look back at the landmark PC processor for its 30th anniversary

In an era where we now have CPUs with tons of cores, super high clock speeds, and integrated graphics, it's interesting to look back at a processor that truly was a revolution in the personal computer industry. We are speaking about the first Intel Pentium processor, which launched 30 years ago this month, on March 22, 1993.

The Pentium was designed to be the next chip in the company's x86 series of processors, and it is the successor to the Intel i486 chips. However, according to an article in the New Yorker, Intel couldn't get a trademark on "586". Intel's then-CEO Andy Grove decided to hire a marketing firm, Lexicon, to come up with a new name. Intel's internal marketing team said the new name had to sound like an ingredient, so Lexicon looked at "sodium" and then took the "ium" out of the word. It then created thousands of names with "ium" at the end. As Lexicon's founder David Placek stated:

“I remember being in the office by myself on a Saturday morning and going over a list,” Placek said. On it was the word “pentium.” “The first thing I thought of was the Pentagon, and I thought, Huh, that’s pretty interesting, because it’s a shape.” Then he remembered that “pente” means five in Greek. “I thought, Wait a minute—we’re going from 486 to the fifth generation, the 586.”

After getting approval from Intel, and making sure the name wouldn't violate any other trademarks, Intel officially announced the Pentium in September 1992. By the way, Lexicon went on to create the name "Blackberry" for the revolutionary smartphone from Research in Motion.

The original Pentium was a big step up in performance and hardware specs compared to the Intel i486 chip. The Pentium was able to handle two instructions per clock cycle (IPC) via two integer pipelines, and it had a much faster floating point unit (FPU) compared to the i486. The first version was made on a 0.8 micron or 800nm process. It had a top clock speed of 66MHz and had 8 kB of Level 1 (L1) Cache, 4MB of Addressable Memory, and 3.1 million transistors. By contrast, the current Intel 13th Gen Core chips have a maximum clock speed of 6.0 GHz, up to 24 cores, and over 70 MB of total cache (L1, L2, L3). Intel doesn't officially reveal the number of transistors for its new chips anymore, but there are estimates that there could be as many as 25.9 billion transistors in 13th Gen Core models.

Both the Intel Pentium name and the processor were a big sales hit for the company. However, in 1994, Thomas R. Nicely, a mathematics professor at Lynchburg College, announced he had found a flaw in the Pentium's floating point unit that could cause the chip to create errors in certain high-end computing tasks. While the floating point unit bug was extremely rare, it still caused many Pentium-based PC owners to have concerns. After a wave of bad publicity about the chip issue, Intel finally announced in December 1994 that it would replace any Pentium processor with one without the floating point flaw for free.

Intel managed to recover from that embarrassing Pentium flaw event and continued to release new CPUs under the Pentium name through the 1990s and into the 2000s, as mid or high-level processors for PCs. In 2006, Intel introduced its Core line of processors and regulated the Pentium brand name to cheaper and lower performances CPUs designed for budget PCs. In September 2022, Intel said it was planning to retire both the Pentium and Celeron brands for its mobile processors in 2023, and its likely Pentium won't be used for any of its desktop PCs going forward.

The legacy of the first Pentium processor, and its successors, still lingers today, however. With the rise of the consumer internet in the mid to late 1990s, tons of people bought PCs with versions of Pentium CPUs inside to go online, play games like Doom and Quake, and more. The PC, which was previously something for computer developers and rich families, soon became an essential household item in the 1990s, and the Intel Pentium processor family was inside the majority of those PCs.

Editor's note: This article was updated shortly after publication to clarify that this is the 30th anniversary of the Intel Pentium processor, not 40th. We regret the error.

The Intel Pentium: A quick look back at the landmark PC processor for its 30th anniversary