Why is there a Pentium 60 AND 66Mhz?! [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd

The first Pentium processors released by Intel way back in 1993 were 60Mhz and 66Mhz variants. But why release 2 processors with such a tiny difference in internal speed? Follow me to find out. Also, I'll tell you why Pentiums are called, erm... Pentiums.

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[epiendless]

I remember Pentiums having a reputation for being difficult to manufacture.
I was once visiting an Intel site in England when for some reason there was an enormous cheer.
I commented, "That's another Pentium off the production line."

[Remi_Jansen]

66mhz is 10% faster than 60 mhz, thats about the same performance improvement we get nowadays with each generation

[daishi]

Rejects = Binning, a process still used today.

[HighTreason]

I knew I forgot about something. Neat to see my graph being used somewhere, I encourage this and fully approve, especially with your sourcing it correctly in the video description. What I like very much here is how the video form is much different, short and clear, accessible to a broader audience, this is the sort of stuff which creates the next generation of retro enthusiasts.

[halofreak]

I've had one of those. The motherboard had a DIP-switch to toggle between 60 and 66 MHz, and the CPU I had ran perfectly fine with either speed, so I kept it at 66.

[patdbean]

Wasn't there a short period of time when pentiums were shipping at 60/66/75/90mzh and 486dx was shipping at 80/100/120mhz ?

[DevilbyMoonlight]

I remember the headaches these chips gave when they 1st come out, if memory serves these were 5v and from the p90 up were 3.3v, the pci bus was also relatively a new thing - the best boards or boards with chipsets to run these chips on were the original intel ones, the opti ones with their VIP ( Vesa ISA PCI) layout lead to lots of headaches, the 66mhz part was better because it ran the pci bus at its native 33 mhz both chips also suffered from the FDIV bug which when it was spread through the media, was a headache for the store I worked in that was building them at the time as we had a lot of customers concerned about faulty chips

[Iskelderon]

A preview of things to come, where defective multi-core CPUs just had the faulty core (and usually its sibling) deactivated to sell them as a lower tier.

[UpTheAnte]

My first PC was an Escom Pentium 60MHz! It was the family PC and I remember talking my dad into buying it over a cheaper 486. I was so relieved when he chose the Pentium. It's about the only time I remember him not buying the cheapest option of something. I dreamt he'd bought an Audi instead of a Fiat once, but yeah, that turned out not to be true.

[KuraIthys]

As a concept using the chips that don't quite work to full specification is fine, and efficient, and makes sense no matter what ideological or economic system you're working with.
The only thing that gets frustrating in terms of capitalism specifically is the deliberate down-rating of products simply because the cheaper ones sell better. I mean, if it's unlockable anyway, you could call that an upside...
But if you take a fully functioning higher spec chip and deliberately cripple parts of it to be able to sell it at a lower price point, because there's more demand for that...
What you are in effect demonstrating is that you're perfectly capable of selling the more expensive variant at the cheaper price, but don't feel like it because you think pretending it's something less capable than it is results in better profits. (because some still buy the more expensive version even though they technically aren't getting anything out of it besides some artificial benefit.)

Still... That's the way things go I guess...

[solhsa]

There were some rumours that 486sx chips were just harvested 486dx chips with a broken FPU, and eventually yields got so good that intel had to start selling 486sx chips where the FPU was fully functional, but disabled.

[paddycoleman]

I worked for Intel when the Pentium was released. I seem to recall the name came from an internal staff competition and the winner received a generous prize.

[lawbag]

An Intel Pentium P100 was my first PC back in 1994 and also my workhorse until 2000.

[myriad]

They also set the bus speed requirements lower for those chips. With that said, Intel was (and maybe still is) quite conservative on their ratings with their CPU’s. When overclocking started to become popular in the late 90’s, at that time (around 1997) I was able to overclock my P75 to 125 MHz for the same reason I just stated.

[sharebrained]

Spot on. I worked at Intel as a technical marketing grunt during college, and was assigned to run some benchmarks one of the first 50 or so Pentium chips available. Not expecting it to run so hot, I grabbed the chip to pull it out of the board and burnt my $^%*^( hand. Once they started making them in quantity, they were fantastic for playing networked Doom in the office, after work was done for the day of course!

[HungryHungryShoggoth]

This process is referred to as "binning" and is still done today. For example, both locked and u locked skews of the i9, i7, i5 and i3 processors are all manufactured on the same silicon wafer, what skew each individual die becomes simply depends on its QC rating. For example, a chip sold as an i7 9700 is fundamentally identical to it's u locked 9700k counterpart but may have underperformed in speed tests thus making it unsuitable for overclocking. Similarly a chip sold as an i5 9600k may score well on speed but have a defective core, so they sell it as a hexacore rather than octacore i7

[hdrenginedevelopment]

An age old overclocker's secret is getting SL specs from late in a series' production run out of the lower speed, lower option models. Late production "economy" cores often yields really good overclocking potential, as the manufacturing process is the most mature and hence the yield rate goes up. More samples will bin at the higher performance targets as the production process matures, but they still have to sell i3's and i5's (or celerons for you old schoolers), so many of those later SL specs will clock to the moon and offer super high value for system tuners because they're basically i7 grade dies that had to sell as i3/i5, and the reduction in on chip cache memory further increases overclocking potential.

[calderov]

:) This was my first CPU. My god, having that computer changed my life forever. Good old times

[southernflatland]

Meanwhile, I successfully managed to overclock my 486DX2 66MHz to 80MHz, with the help of a little aftermarket cooler and some creative jumper settings and BIOS settings...

[pelimies]

I had one of these rejects.. Still, Quake ran very smoothly :)