Happy 20th birthday to the Intel Premium line

Yesterday, the Pentium processor turned 20 years old, a huge milestone for Intel.

The first chip in the line, the Pentium P5, was introduced on March 22nd, 1993, boasting such impressive specs as 66 MHz clock speed, 3.1 million transistors, a TDP of up to 16 W, and a 800nm manufacturing process.

Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors have clock speeds up to 3.90GHz, 1.4 billion transistors, a TDP of up to 77W and a 22nm dye process, making the chips many, many, many, many times more powerful and smaller than their older brother.

Engadget has collected a couple of funny old Pentium videos, including one by parody artist Weird Al Yankovic.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 23 Mar 2013 18:05

DDR4life

"boasting such impressive specs as 66 MHz clock speed"

Lol. Does anyone remember when the PC magazines would recommend that to get smooth video playback you needed to have a minimum clock speed of a whopping 100 mHz?

24.3.2013 16:58 #1

ddp

is not pentium 5 but is pentium 1 as patent office would not let intel patent "586" so intel patent "pentium" 1.

24.3.2013 21:13 #2

xenoxx

Originally posted by DDR4life: "boasting such impressive specs as 66 MHz clock speed"

Lol. Does anyone remember when the PC magazines would recommend that to get smooth video playback you needed to have a minimum clock speed of a whopping 100 mHz? .... My first CPU that could play an MP4 was a 486dx100!

25.3.2013 03:13 #3

aldan

my first computer had a pentium p54c. lightening man.LOL

25.3.2013 16:37 #4

Jeffrey_P

My first intel powered PC was an 8088.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8088
Before that it was a whole slew of Amiga's
Jeff

25.3.2013 19:29 #5

ddp

aldan, still a pentium 1 tho is an intel 5th generation cpu. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium

25.3.2013 20:25 #6

aldan

its kinda funny looking back.at the time i thought i would never want to upgrade. hell,i have programs now that are bigger than my hardrive was.

25.3.2013 21:36 #7

ddp

i still have my 1st hard drive, a 105meg rodime scsi half height 5.25" hard drive.

25.3.2013 21:53 #8

aldan

three things i said i would never do. live in a small town,own a computer,and have a cell phone.well i dont own a cell phone anymore.LOL

26.3.2013 01:12 #9

plazma247

@ddp, actually i think it was because intel got pissed at cyrix over 486, to which cyrix rebranded 586, but it was so long ago i forget exactly.

As for all you whipper snappers that came in post maths co on chip or board, u lucky something or others. I remember the days when you would solder in another quartz crystal to get a higher clock and stick an mfm hard disk onto an rll controller to be able to reformat and gain a few extra meg. That said my first hard disk was 10 meg full height 5 1/4. Arrrh them were the days hehe

28.3.2013 18:53 #10

aldan

Originally posted by plazma247: @ddp, actually i think it was because intel got pissed at cyrix over 486, to which cyrix rebranded 586, but it was so long ago i forget exactly.

As for all you whipper snappers that came in post maths co on chip or board, u lucky something or others. I remember the days when you would solder in another quartz crystal to get a higher clock and stick an mfm hard disk onto an rll controller to be able to reformat and gain a few extra meg. That said my first hard disk was 10 meg full height 5 1/4. Arrrh them were the days hehe damn you are old.lol.

28.3.2013 19:19 #11

plazma247

Thanks :-p your only as old as the person you feel, thankfull the misses younger than me lolz

28.3.2013 19:22 #12

ddp

i think i still have a 5meg full height 5.25" hard drive upstairs. do have a couple of sealed boxes of 8" floppy disks plus the floppy drive upstairs.

28.3.2013 19:24 #13

plazma247

Hehe, 8" floppy, sorry it still tickles me, hehe 5meg hdd whats the make? Talking of small hard drive sizes pre self parking heads, i remember dropping an old pc down the stairs (3 or 4) when i was young thanks to my little size and the tank thick cases of the day, which i can only assume were so thick to repel small arms fire.. anyway i remeber being very grateful i ran park.exe before i turned it off and ended up doing more damage to the stairs.. they just dont make em like the used to.

28.3.2013 19:34 #14

ddp

i think it is a seagate.

28.3.2013 19:42 #15

plazma247

ST506 maybe? http://redhill.net.au/d/d-a.html

Just look at them puppies wraarrrrrrr.

28.3.2013 19:51 #16

Jeffrey_P

Plazma247, I'm laughing..
First I purchased a bunch of crystal oscillators within a couple of MHz each other. Soldered a header to the motherboard. Plug-in different speed CO's until the PC wouldn't boot then back down a couple of MHz.
Science!

28.3.2013 20:19 #17

plazma247

Hehe, the early days of over clocking hehe, yeah thats was the trick, although the first time i did it i only had 3 to chose from lol.

28.3.2013 20:30 #18

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