Is it true that the name PENTIUM was chosen by INTEL in anticipation of the 5 chips that it was going to release over the years or is it some other reason?

 

Their PC chip lines progressed with numerical designations starting with the original 8086 line, then the 286 line, then 386, then 486. Next step would have ben 586 but why not market it with a fancy name like pentium?
Penta is (Greek I think) meaning 5, as a pentagon is a 5 sided geometric shape.
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As I recall it would have been called the 586, in keeping with the previous processors - BUT, after a great many years someone at Intel finally noticed that you can't make a number a trademark. This had previously allowed other manufacturers to sell processors called 286, 386 and 486, and Intel couldn't do much about it.

By choosing the name Pentium they were able to establish it as a trademark, preventing other processor manufacturers copying the name.

As it turned out it didn't really make much difference, the other manufacturers just choose made up names as well - although without the reference to five.

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i don't recall any news about a pentium 5 being made?

They announced last week they are dropping all plans for a 4GHz processor and instead are going to farthur develop there other processors instead.

...which is understandable, if you look at the characteristic impedences of wires etc... they can only go so fast with the current materials in my opinion. AMD has a huge leg up on them in that department, there processors running at a lot less GHz are doing a WHOLE lot more. Not to mention the 64 bit AMD processors are simply SMASHING Intel's processors.

Alot of people predict Intel isn't going to have anything for the next two years... they pretty well sckrewed themselves over. With the pentiun 4 line, instead of pumping out excellent qaulity products and letting the sales follow, they decided to put out products designed to be marketable and sell. The end result: AMD came up from behind with much better processors, and as happened in the past with intel, the sales are going to follow. AMD is going to take control of the desktop PC market, intel is going to be stuck with the laptops only for awhile.

 

Nigel is right. the name pentium was chosen to stop others from copying names like 286, 386 etc.

i would like to add a little to plot's reply. AMD has released the Athlon64 4000+ before Intel even produced a 4MHz chip. in the past the only area where the pentium excelled from the Athlons was encoding. but the recent results show that the engineers at AMD have solved that problem too. and AMD is the first one to bring in 64-bit computing for the PC user.

have a look at the article http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041019/index.html

 

There has to be a speed limit. We're talking Ghz (x10^9) here. Electricity only travels at around the speed of light (about 3x10^8), so we are reaching a point where the speed of the proccesor is fundamentaly limited by the speed of electricity. So you have to make the boards smaller, so it doesn't have to travel as far, but then things get so small that electrons start jumping from one track to another. Its getting to the point where we're gonna have to have super cooled proccessors (I'm talking liquid helium), to try and stop arcing between tracks.

^ aparently, anyway.

This is why AMD decided to go in the 64bit direction, intead of just trying to increase the speed. Pentium were onto something with their hyper-threading technology, but most consumers didn't understand it, so it didn't take off. imo. Since they brought out the Athlons, I switched from pentiums to using Athlons, and have never looked back. unfortunately, I can't take advantage of the 64bit proccessors while still running win98 though...

 

Yes, I remember that Pentium was meant to denote a "5"86 family processor (penta is Greek for 5), should'nt the next generation processor have been called the Sexium! (sex is Greek for 6) Just think of the marketing possibilities that *ntel missed out on!

 

yes there will be a limit to the silicon technology we have today. thats why there is a lot of research for improving the existing technology like strained silicon. and with that there is also a great amount of R&D into better alternatives like quantum computing etc. there is a company by the name of Silicon Photonics (or something like that) which is developing interconnects for microprocessors that wont require copper. instead of copper they will use light waves, thus reducing the limitations of copper interconnects and eliminating the heat produced due to the interconnects.

the computer of the future will surely be nothing of what we have seen so far.

u dont have to be disappointed. the launch of windowXP 64-bit edition is just around the corner. then the popularity of the athlons will significantly increase against the P4-EEs that are already entangled in a number of issues including the large heat dissipation. the guys at Intel are also planning for a 64-bit chip. lets see what happens

 

u dont have to be disappointed. the launch of windowXP 64-bit edition is just around the corner. then the popularity of the athlons will significantly increase against the P4-EEs that are already entangled in a number of issues including the large heat dissipation. the guys at Intel are also planning for a 64-bit chip. lets see what happens[/quote]
I thought Xp 64bit was already released...? anyway, I hate XP with a vengence, and won't be buying it unless I abolutely have to.

If Intel can get some decent quality 64-bit proccesors out, it should make for some interesting competition...

 

no, the windowsXP 64-bit edition hasnt been officially released yet. it is still in the beta testing stages. the guys at microsoft are developing the drivers and stuff like that. there isnt any release date yet but it is expected early next year. i dont understand why you hate XP. but i think it must be something like me hating WindowsME back when it was released.

 

lol, don't get me started on ME!

I'm sure I'd learn to live with it over time, but the only exposure I really get to it is when other people ask me to de-crappify their computers. And XP seems to be designed so that when something goes wrong, its impossible to put right. And as someone who is quite fond of building/re-building these things from scratch, having a very limited ability to troubleshoot problems is in itself a problem.

IMHO, XP is designed for people who buy a new computer when there's goes wrong, instead of actually doing something to solve the problem. This, being a student, is no use to me whatsoever. XP Pro goes some way towards changing this, but not far enough imo.

Yeah, I know, I'm probably wrong etc etc, but thats my opinion and I'm gonna stick to it.

 

i agree, i was used to win98 for a long time and troubleshooting on a win98 machine was a piece of cake. i was so fond of re-installing windows that i did it on a regular basis on my computer :lol: and when someone asked me that something wasnt working i would try to solve it by some trick and if it didnt get right i would just say re-install your windows. my freinds got used to hearing this from me.

anyway you can do the same with windowsXP. all you need is a win98 boot disk. just boot from it and use the command prompt as you did in win98.

anyway this is getting seriously out of context. i hope nobody gets angry because of this ops:

 

hmm yes

Sorry guys! ops:

 

just wondering, I dont know if it was already posted or not, but is it called a pentium/586 because 2^5=32 and it's a 32 bit processor? \

And while we're on the topic of old processors, what was the purpose of a math co-processor? I remember my friend not being able to run a computer game because his 386 didn't have a math co-processor.

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To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

the intel 486 is also a 32-bit microprocessor http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/intel486/

so if the reason for pentium was the 2^5 then the 486 would have first called the pentium.

the reason for the name pentium has already been told by Nigel i.e. it was chosen because of trademark issues.

about the math co-processor, well, i believe that it does what its name suggests. it helps in math calculations. actually the processors of that time werent capable of doing lengthy floating point math calculations. so for the bigger calculations a second processor was added to help it do the maths. then as time went on the amount of minituarization increased and the number of transistors per unit area increased and hence the math co processor was finally added with the processor itself.

the reason your freind wasnt able to play games without the math co-processor was because games require alot of math calculations which his 386 could not perform alone. if it had a math co-processor it would have been able to do the complex math required for games.