Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium was released in 1993.

<processor> Intel's superscalar successor to the 486. It has two 32-bit 486-type integer pipelines with dependency checking. It can execute a maximum of two instructions per cycle. It does pipelined floating-point and performs branch prediction. It has 16 kilobytes of on-chip cache, a 64-bit memory interface, 8 32-bit general-purpose registers and 8 80-bit floating-point registers. It is built from 3.1 million transistors on a 262.4 mm^2 die with Pentium2.3 million transistors in the core logic. Its clock rate is 66MHz, heat dissipation is 16W, integer performance is 64.5 SPECint92, floating-point performance 56.9 SPECfp92. It is called "Pentium" because it is the fifth in the 80x86 line. It would have been called the 80586 had a US court not ruled that you can't trademark a number. The successors are the Pentium Pro and Pentium II. The following Pentium variants all belong to "x86 Family 6", as reported by "Microsoft Windows" when identifying the CPU: Model Name 1 Pentium Pro 2 ? 3 Pentium II 4 ? 5, 6 Celeron or Pentium II 7 Pentium III 8 Celeron uPGA2 or Mobile Pentium III A {pentium/FAQ">floating-point division bug (ftp://ftp.isi.edu/pub/carlton/pentium/FAQ)} was discovered in October 1994. [Internal implementation, "Microprocessor Report" newsletter, 1993-03-29, volume 7, number 4]. [Pentium based computers, PC Magazine, 1994-01-25]. (2003-09-30)

<processor> (Known as "P6" during development) Intel's successor to the Pentium processor, in development Jan 1995, generally available 1995-11-01. The P6 has an internal RISC architecture with a CISC-RISC translator, 3-way superscalar execution, and out-of order execution (or "speculative execution", which Intel calls "{Dynamic Execution}"). It also features branch prediction and register renaming, and is superpipelined (14 stages). The P6 is made as a two-chip assembly: the first chip is the CPU and 16 kilobyte first-level cache (5.5 million transistors) and the other is a 256 (or 512) kilobyte second-level cache (15 million transistors). The first version has a clock rate of 133 Mhz and consumes about 20W of power. It is about twice as fast as the 100 MHz Pentium. The original 0.35 micron versions of the Pentium Pro released on 1995-11-01 run at 150 and 166 Mhz for desktop machines and up to 200 Mhz for servers. Heat disspation is about 20 Watts. The Pentium Pro is optimised for 32-bit software and runs 16-bit software slower than the original Pentium. The successor was the Pentium II. [Performance?] (1996-03-01)