#Intel pentium 4 series
With the 2006 introduction of the Intel Core brand as the company's new flagship line of processors, the Pentium series was to be discontinued. In 1998, Intel introduced the Celeron brand for low-priced microprocessors. In 2006, the name briefly disappeared from Intel's technology roadmaps, only to re-emerge in 2007. ĭue to its success, the Pentium brand would continue through several generations of high-end processors.
The suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element, while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86. Marketing firm Lexicon Branding was hired to coin a name for the new processor. įollowing Intel's prior series of 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors, the firm's first P5-based microprocessor was released as the original Intel Pentium on March 22, 1993. However, as the firm wanted to prevent their competitors from branding their processors with similar names (as AMD had done with their Am486), Intel filed a trademark application on the name in the United States, but was denied because a series of numbers was considered to lack trademark distinctiveness. The original Pentium-branded CPUs were expected to be named 586 or i586, to follow the naming convention of prior generations ( 286, i386, i486). These usually become widely known, even after the processors are given official names on launch.Ī 100 MHz Pentium processor manufactured in 1996 See also: List of Intel Pentium microprocessorsĭuring development, Intel generally identifies processors with codenames, such as Prescott, Willamette, Coppermine, Katmai, Klamath, or Deschutes.
In 2017, Intel split Pentium into two line-ups: The name "Pentium" is originally derived from the Greek word pente ( πεντε), meaning "five", a reference to the prior numeric naming convention of Intel's 80x86 processors (8086–80486), with the Latin ending -ium since the processor would otherwise have been named 80586 using that convention. Pentium processors with Core architectures prior to 2017 were distinguished from the faster, higher-end i-series processors by lower clock rates and disabling some features, such as hyper-threading, virtualization and sometimes 元 cache. In the case of Atom architectures, Pentiums are the highest performance implementations of the architecture. They are based on both the architecture used in Atom and that of Core processors. As of 2017, Pentium processors have little more than their name in common with earlier Pentiums, which were Intel's flagship processor for over a decade until the introduction of the Intel Core line in 2006.