The Original Pentium CPU

There's no question that the Intel "P5" Pentium processor brought a whole new experience to the personal computer. A huge step up from Intel's 80486, the new CPU featured two pipelines that allowed for more than one instruction per clock cycle, a faster floating point unit, and more. By today's standards, the CPU was anemic, clocking in at 60 or 66 MHz.

Eventually the Pentium broke into 100 MHz territory with the P54C. Three years later, the Pentium MMX (P55C) hit the market using the same basic microarchitecture as the older Pentium, but came packed with even larger caches, MMX instructions, and a few other additions. This processor was promoted to improve the performance of multimedia tasks, thanks to the additional 57 MMX instructions.