 |
 |
Pentium
Name: Kevin
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1995
Question:
I am inquiring about the new Pentium chip. I have heard that is not
"perfected" yet. I have also heard, through the grape vine, that it may
never be perfected. Could you please explain how it works, what its
drawbacks are, and whether or not it can be fixed? I would also like to
know if that is the only 586 processor in the making.
Replies:
I do not know about being perfected - as far as I know they are currently
working fine in many computers already out there in the marketplace. It
turns out, though, that Intel is not going to make nearly as much money
selling Pentium as it did selling the 486 chips - basically, the speed
increase is only a factor of 2 for integer operations, and 4 for floating
point (at 66 MHz), which is not nearly as big as the jump was going from 386
to 486. Those clock speeds are also kind of nearing a limit, I think (the
fastest clock around is for the Digital Alpha chip, which runs at up to 200
MHz, but that was pretty hard to achieve, I hear, so I do not believe
Pentium is ever going to run at that kind of speed (which may be what you
were hearing about "perfection"). I do not know of any other "586"-style
processors around (I assume you mean made by somebody besides Intel?) but
there are a lot of competing chips of similar or better performance already
in the market: DEC's Alpha, IBM and Motorola's PowerPC, etc. Intel is
planning to come out to successors to the Pentium pretty soon too, I believe
(e.g. 686 or whatever).
A Smith
Click here to return to the Computer Science Archives
| |
Update: June 2012
|
|
