Word: pentium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world's largest 486 maker and will continue to be so -- by far. Given its comparatively modest manufacturing capacity, "AMD is going to be limited to 5% of the market share," predicts Montgomery Securities analyst Thomas Thornhill. Perhaps more important, Intel has already launched the next generation chip, the Pentium, destined to leave the 486 in the dust...
This re-christened 80586 chip contains more than three millions transistors (in comparison, the 486 has about 1.2 million) and can run five times faster than the 486, now the best-selling product from Intel. As Intel will not set the pricing for the Pentium until May, the first systems based on the new chip are not expected to arrive until sometime this summer...
Initial performance tests have indicated that the Alpha 21064 implementation is faster than the 66-MHz Pentium, partly due to a faster clock speed and also because the Alpha is a 64-bit processor as opposed to the Pentium's 32-bit data path. An analogy: just as a six-lane highway allows far more traffic than a two-lane street, the wider a computer's data path, the faster data can flow...
...Pentium and other processors from Intel and Motorola, on the other hand, follow a design philosophy called complex instruction set computing (CISC), aimed at doing as many kinds of tasks on the chip as possible, thereby making the programmer's life easier but costing time with slower instruction execution...
...battle between the two strategies appears to be won by the RISC side, as evidenced by the proliferation of RISC systems and RISC features included in the Pentium and the Motorola 68050, a chip still in development. Despite all the heat in the microprocessor industry, most users need not be concerned since many of the new systems will be able to run software written for rival machines...