What Does the Pentium Chip Do?

The Pentium chip was revolutionary in more ways than one.

Introduced in 1993, the Pentium chip is the first chip of its kind to have a name instead of a number -- because the courts had just decided that a number could not be patented. Intel had planned to call it, simply, "80586."

Basics

The Pentium is an entire computer Central Processing Unit (CPU) on a single chip. Previously, the components of the CPU were spread out over several chips. Processing a computer instruction is much faster if you don't have to go "off-chip" for some of the processing. Speeding up the processing of each instruction speeds up the entire program.

On-Chip Cache

The Pentium has some cache memory "on-chip." Cache memory is where the piece of the program that is currently being worked on is stored. If the cache is on the chip, it takes a lot less time to fetch each new instruction to work on -- which makes the program run faster.

Super Scaler Processing

The Pentium used a process called "pipelining" to process one instruction while fetching the next one. It is like using a washer and dryer at the same time when processing multiple loads of laundry instead of waiting for each load to be washed and then dried before processing the next load. The result: twice the speed.

References

• NewEgg: The Pentium Processor Chip
• CPUWorld: The Pentium Processor
• XbitLabs: The Pentium CPU Chip

Resources

• SearchCIO: The Pentium 3