Pentium

Pentium is a brand of central processing units (CPUs) produced by Intel. Introduced in 1993 as the successor to the 486 architecture, the original Pentium, based on the P5 microarchitecture, marked Intel's shift to a superscalar design and a performance leap for x86 PCs. The name Pentium comes from the Latin five, reflecting design innovations that allowed multiple instructions to be dispatched per cycle.

First released in 1993–1994 at speeds up to 66 MHz, the original Pentium combined two integer pipelines and an integrated floating-point unit in a single chip, along with unified L1 caches. The product gained rapid market traction in desktops and workstations. In 1994 Intel faced a widely publicized FDIV accuracy bug in some Pentium processors, which led to a recall and a widely publicized exchange program.

Intel then expanded the Pentium line with the P6 family. Pentium Pro (1995) introduced out-of-order execution and larger caches, improving performance in business and server workloads. Pentium II (1997) added improved multimedia capabilities such as MMX. Pentium III (1999) introduced further instruction set extensions such as SSE for multimedia workloads.

In 2000 Intel released Pentium 4, based on the NetBurst architecture, emphasizing high clock speeds and new features such as SSE2. The Pentium 4 era saw rapid GHz growth and a broad range of desktop and laptop processors, including later dual-core variants marketed under the Pentium brand, as Intel shifted toward the Core architecture for mainstream performance.

From the mid-2000s onward, Intel's Core line became the main performance tier, while Pentium continued as a budget-oriented brand alongside Core i3 and i5 products. Pentium-branded CPUs have remained common in value desktops and laptops, with various generations supplying basic computing, office tasks, and media playback, while newer generations focus on efficiency.