Pentium
The P55C (or 80503) was developed by Intel's Research & Development Center in Haifa, Israel. It was sold as Pentium with MMX Technology (usually just called Pentium MMX); although it was based on the P5 core (the 0.35 µm process was also used for this series) it featured a new set of 57 "MMX" instructions intended to improve performance on multimedia tasks, such as encoding and decoding digital media data.
The new instructions work on new data types: 64-bit packed vectors of either eight 8-bit integers, four 16-bit integers, two 32-bit integers, or one 64-bit integer. So, for example, the PADDUSB (Packed ADD Unsigned Saturated Byte) instruction adds two vectors, each containing eight 8-bit unsigned integers together, pairwise; each addition that would overflow saturates, yielding 255, the maximum unsigned value that can be represented in a byte. These rather specialized instructions generally require special coding by the programmer for them to be used. MMX did not achieve significant popularity until after the P55C's lifetime[citation needed].
The performance of the P55C was improved over previous versions by a doubling of the Level 1 CPU cache from 16 KiB to 32 KiB.
Pentium P55C notebook CPUs used a "mobile module" that held the CPU. This module was a PCB with the CPU directly attached to it in a special smaller form factor. The module snapped to the notebook motherboard and typically a heat spreader plate was installed and made contact with the module. Such notebooks frequently used the Intel 430MX chipset, a feature-reduced 430FX. However, with the 0.25 µm Tillamook Mobile Pentium MMX (named after a city in Oregon), the module also held the 430TX chipset along with the system's 512 KiB SRAM cache memory.
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As a benchmark
Microsoft and many other companies use the original Pentium as a standard for specifications of requirements. For example, Microsoft's stated requirements for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition, include (at least) a Pentium processor running at a clock speed of 600 MHz (required), or 1 GHz (recommended). To find out if another processor meets the requirement, a conversion must be used that gives its speed in terms of standard Pentium clock rates. For example, a Pentium Pro would meet the requirement running at a lower clock speed, because of its more advanced architecture. An equivalency chart is usually used to compare more modern processors to find out if they meet this requirement.
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As a trademark
Intel used the "Pentium" trademark in many brand names of x86 (instruction set) processors of later generations with different microarchitectures radically departed from the P5 found in CPUs originally branded as the "Pentium" only. They include:
- Pentium Pro
- Pentium II, Pentium II Xeon
- Pentium III, Pentium III Xeon
- Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4 M, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
- Pentium M
- Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition
- Pentium Dual-Core
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Competitors
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See also
- Vinod Dham
- CPU design
- COAST (Cache on a stick), L2 cache modules for Pentium
- IA-32 processor design and instruction set
- Pentium Compatible Processor
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References
- ^ Microprocessor Hall of Fame. Intel. Retrieved on 2007-08-11.
- ^ Intel® Pentium® Processor Family. Intel. Retrieved on 2007-08-14.
- ^ View Processors Chronologically by Date of Introduction:. Intel. Retrieved on 2007-08-14.
- ^ "Intel "Conroe-L" Details Unveiled", DailyTech. Retrieved on 2007-08-16.
- ^ The multicore era is upon us - CNET Asia
- ^ "Intel to unify product naming scheme", TG Daily. Retrieved on 2007-08-12.
- ^ Vinod Dham, Father of Pentium Processor, on Investing in India. PodTech.net (2006-10-16). Retrieved on 2007-08-16. “Vinod Dham, Father of Pentium Processor”
- ^ Bach, John (10 2000). The Technology Trailblazer: Vinod Dham. University Relations, University of Cincinnati. Retrieved on 2007-08-16. “Today, known in the industry as the "Father of the Pentium"”
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External links
- CPU-Collection.de - Intel Pentium images and descriptions
- Plasma Online Intel CPU Identification
- Pictures of all known Pentium chips at chipdb.org
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