Intel Ships First Pentium: Computing Revolution Starts

Intel's first Pentium processor could execute 100 million instructions per second, five times faster than the chip it replaced. Shipped on March 22, 1993, the Pentium represented a fundamental leap in personal computing: a 64-bit data bus, 3.1 million transistors on a single die, and superscalar architecture that could process two instructions simultaneously. The $878 chip made desktop computers powerful enough to handle tasks previously reserved for workstations. Intel had dominated the processor market since the 8086 in 1978, but by the early 1990s the company faced genuine competition from AMD and Cyrix, which were producing cheaper clones of Intel's 486 architecture. The Pentium was Intel's answer: a chip so different from its predecessor that competitors couldn't simply reverse-engineer it. The name itself was a marketing innovation. Intel couldn't trademark a number (486, 586), so they coined "Pentium" from the Greek word for five. The first Pentium ran at 60 MHz on a 0.8-micron process. Within a year, Intel discovered the infamous FDIV bug, a floating-point division error that produced incorrect results for certain rare calculations. Intel initially dismissed the flaw, telling customers they would encounter it only once every 27,000 years. When IBM publicly disagreed and halted Pentium sales, Intel reversed course and offered free replacements, taking a $475 million write-off. The FDIV debacle taught the semiconductor industry that consumer trust matters as much as transistor counts. But the Pentium line endured, powering the 1990s PC boom, the rise of the internet, and a generation of software that assumed processor power would keep doubling. Intel shipped its 100 millionth Pentium-class chip within five years of launch.