Discussion
What came after 486?
specproc: I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
stevefan1999: Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium.But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
laurencerowe: i686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.
zem: I always figured the "-ium" part was in imitation of element naming, to make it sound scientific
Anonasty: The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.
rob74: Por qué no los dos? If "-ium" makes nerds think of an element name, and others of a premium product, all the better. I'd bet both of these interpretations were listed in the original internal presentation of the name...
sehugg: I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.
rasz: Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000.December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching August 1998 P2 450.January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE).Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.
rob74: Another interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.
