The Birth of the Pentium II and the End of Netburst (PCGH-Retro May 07)

…1997: Calling the 586 processor ‘Pentium’ for advertising purposes paid off for Intel – the brand is better known than any other in the computer world. Reason enough to stick with the successor: the new CPU that Intel is introducing on May 7, 1997 is simply called the Pentium II. so: don’t snore lame) 16-bit mode, the MMX commands and has an L2 cache on the board. This, in turn, is in a bulky housing called SECC and the whole thing doesn’t fit on a socket, but in a slot that Intel simply calls Slot 1 – a system that, however, was abolished in later Pentium III models in favor of a socket. The first Pentium II chips run at 233 to 300 MHz and a FSB clock of 66 MHz, which is enough to set it apart from its predecessor and AMD’s K6 CPUs for the time being. This is how the PII is also a success – and Intel will subsequently adorn other CPU generations with the sonorous “Pentium” name until…. (see below).

…2004: The netburst architecture of the Pentium 4 was supposed to reach ten gigahertz, ever higher clock frequencies were the path chosen by Intel to achieve more performance. But this became a dead end; the P4 cores Northwood and Prescott missed their clock targets, didn’t even reach 4 gigahertz – the thermal problems at high clock rates became too big. Therefore, on May 7, 2004, Intel stopped developing the Netburst-based Prescott successor called Tejas. This was supposed to come onto the market at the beginning of 2005 with at least 4.4 gigahertz, but the first examples produced 150 watts of waste heat even at low clock rates – far too much. With the Tejas, the Netburst architecture and the Pentium 4 also died out, henceforth Intel concentrated on further developing the efficient Pentium M into a two-core desktop chip: the Core 2 Duo.