The Pentium processors, traditionally designed for desktops and notebooks, form now are part of the computer history. With the introduction of Intel Core2 on 27, July 2006, Intel closed definitively an era of computing dominantly marked by one of its component groups, and new products no longer hold the name Pentium.

The Pentium chip, the successor of the line 486 developed by Vinod Dham based on the 5th generation architecture of x86, was launched on the 22th of March, 1993, after a long wait. It was a tremendous success: it has doubled its previous performance, on the other hand it made Intel one of the biggest producers.

Originally, it was expected to be named 80586 or i586 but series of numbers could generally not be filed as trademark so Intel prevented their competitors from branding their processors with similar names. They followed the previous naming convention or invented new ones like AMD or Athlon.

Marketing firm Lexicon Branding was hired to coin a name for the new processor. The suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element, while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation after the series 8086, 286, 386 and 486. The brand name was so successful that it was used to name several subsequent processor generations starting from the Pentium Pro launched in November, 1995 to the Pentium Extreme Edition. The production of the dual-core Extreme Edition, part of the Pentium 4 line, was completed in 2008.

Compared with the 486, Pentium brought three important changes: as on of the first computer with RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture it had two pipelines (superscalar architecture), it had a data bus width of 64 bit, (in later versions) it was capable to handle MMIX instructions.

With Pentium, Intel became a market leader company of the CPU market and when Windows 95 has been launched, the Wintel Alliance was established “between the system and the processor” that since then, fundamentally determined the informatics.