The Pentium processor's 18th birthday

We chart the ups and downs of Intel's best-loved processor

The first Pentium processor hit the market on March 22, 1993. Its big difference from the i486 architecture that preceded it was two data pipelines, allowing it to effectively complete two instructions per clock cycle — multitasking in a way earlier processors couldn't. In 1996, the Pentium MMX was introduced, allowing the processor to more efficiently handle certain tasks like multimedia decoding and encoding.

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