L1 cache | 16–32 KiB |
---|---|
Model | Pentium series |
Created | March 22, 1993 |
Architecture | P5 (IA-32) |
Instructions | MMX |
Socket(s) | |
Predecessor | Intel 80486 |
Successor | P6 |
The first Pentium microprocessor was introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. Dubbed P5, its microarchitecture was the fifth generation for Intel, and the first superscalar IA-32 microarchitecture. As a direct extension of the 80486 architecture, it included dual integer pipelines, a faster floating-point unit, wider data bus, separate code and data caches and features for further reduced address calculation latency. In 1996, the Pentium with MMX Technology (often simply referred to as Pentium MMX) was introduced with the same basic microarchitecture complemented with an MMX instruction set, larger caches, and some other enhancements.
The P5 Pentium competitors included the Motorola 68060 and the PowerPC 601 as well as the SPARC, MIPS, and Alpha microprocessor families, most of which also used a superscalar in-order dual instruction pipeline configuration at some time.
Intel's Larrabee multicore architecture project uses a processor core derived from a P5 core (P54C), augmented by multithreading, 64-bit instructions, and a 16-wide vector processing unit. Intel's low-powered Bonnell microarchitecture employed in early Atom processor cores also uses an in-order dual pipeline similar to P5.