Pentium

What Does Pentium Mean?

Pentium is the brand name of a series of microprocessors produced by Intel Corporation. It was released in 1993 as the successor to the Intel 80486.

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Pentium is also known as Pentium 1, P5 or sometimes Intel 80586, as it was the fifth generation of Intel microprocessors.

Techopedia Explains Pentium

The first microprocessor in the Pentium series was the Pentium 1. This chip’s features included:

  • 32-bit processing
  • Base clock speed of 66HZ to 300MHZ
  • 16 KB to 32KB L1 cache
  • Fast serial bus (FSB) up to 66 MHz

Its substantial improvements over the 80486 included:

  • Introduction of superscalar architecture
  • Three times the transistors
  • Faster floating point calculations
  • Data caches

In addition to the Pentium I, other Pentium microprocessors include:

  • Pentium II
  • Pentium III
  • Pentium IV
  • Pentium M
  • Pentium Dual Core
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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…