Wednesday, June 17, 2009
In 1993, Intel announced the Pentium chip. The word "Pentium" comes from the Greek root word "pentas" meaning "five." The Pentium is the Intel 80586 chip. The Pentium is a 32-bit chip with superscalar design, and is estimated to be two times faster than the 486DX2 (66MHz) chip. The Pentium uses dual pipelines to allow it to process two separate instructions in a single cycle. The Pentium has a 64 bit bus interface, an eight bit code cache, an eight bit data cache, and branch prediction memory bank. Don Alpert was the architecture manager of the Pentium, John Crawford was co-manager. In March 1994, Intel announced new and faster versions of the Pentium microprocessor, with speeds of over 100 MHz. By 1996, 200 Mhz microcomputer systems were available on the market. (This chip has now been far surpassed by current microprocessor technology.)