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Intel’s ‘Intel Processor’ to Replace Pentium, Celeron Brands for Laptops in 2023

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Intel will decommission its legendary Celeron and Pentium brands used for basic notebook CPUs. Instead, starting in 2023, they will be referred to as the rather humble «Intel Processor» name. The move will allow the company to sharpen its focus on premium Core, Evo, and vPro brands and sell more premium CPUs. 

For now, Intel will continue to use Celeron and Pentium brands for desktop and embedded applications. When asked how this branding change would affect desktops, Intel told us, «Desktop has no new products in this segment slated for Q1 ’23.»

Intel’s notebook product stack today includes a variety of Core-branded processors for high-performance, mid-range, and entry-level laptops, as well as Pentium and Celeron-badged CPUs for inexpensive essential systems. Starting from 2023 with notebooks, Intel will unite its Pentium and Celeron product families under the Intel Processor umbrella and will continue to address respective market segments. The new brand leaves unchanged Intel’s existing processors (they will sell under their own names) and the company’s product roadmap. 

«The new Intel Processor branding will simplify our offerings so users can focus on choosing the right processor for their needs,» said Josh Newman, Intel vice president and interim general manager of Mobile Client Platforms.

While the merge may clear up some confusion between various Pentium and Celeron-branded laptop offerings, it might also create some new puzzlements. 

Intel’s mobile Pentium Gold products are based on the company’s designs featuring high-performance or high-performance and energy-efficient cores, therefore offering an experience comparable to that of fully-fledged Core processors. For example, the company currently offers Pentium Gold-badged Alder Lake CPUs with one high-performance Golden Cove and four energy-efficient Gracemont cores (8505). 

Intel’s mobile Celeron processors are also based on the company’s designs with performance (6305) or performance and efficient cores (7305). However, since they sit below mobile Pentiums, they have lower clocks, have smaller caches, or lack certain features. Yet, these are still quite capable chips for basic workloads. 

Merging mobile Pentium Gold and Celeron product families into one Intel Processor lineup makes sense on the condition that model numbers accurately represent their performance and capabilities.  

There are other Celeron and Pentium-branded processors for laptops too. Intel’s mobile Celeron N and Pentium Silver processors are based on energy-efficient Atom-class cores and barely offer performance that is even slightly close to that of mobile Pentium Gold and ‘vanilla’ Celeron CPUs with high-performance cores. Intel did not update these product families this year as its Alder Lake-N design featuring only energy-efficient Gracemont cores is not yet here. But Intel is certainly prepping these system-on-chips for launch, and they might address market segments of Celeron N and Pentium Silver. 

We do not know whether or not Intel plans to add Alder Lake-N into the Intel Processor lineup for mobile PCs. But if it does, pouring in designs based solely on energy-efficient Atom-class cores into the lineup with quite different chips will create a lot of confusion.  

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Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

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The complete history of Pentium processors — from A to M / Habr

Hello %username%. Those who are subscribed to our blog have already noticed that we regularly publish articles about the history of the Intel Pentium processors. Initially, we planned to write only one text, but we got used to it and created a whole series of articles. Largely thanks to Vitaliy (here he is, in the photo), head of system administration at Selectel by day and founder of the Digital Vintage collection of rare hardware by night. He has many more stories in store, so there are many more interesting essays and reviews of old school technology waiting for you.

Under the cut, we have collected the full history of Pentium processors: from the very first Pentium 66 MHz to the latest Pentium D and Pentium M. Let’s remember all the successes and failures, remember those who left forever, and celebrate those who suddenly escaped oblivion.

The hero of this article is the familiar Intel Pentium processor, which entered the market on March 22, 1993. Its history is connected with the period of the most rapid development of computer technologies. The processor gave life to the latest universal PC platform — Socket 7.

K5 is delayed, development of Cyrix 5×86 and 6×86(!) is in full swing, IDT is working on MIPS processors, no one has heard of Rise yet. And Intel releases a new chipset 430FX (Triton). The article continues the story about Intel Pentium processors and the further development of x86 processors.

The Intel Pentium Pro was the first processor optimized for 32-bit code execution, with the P6 core, which later served as the basis for most x86 Intel processors with the exception of Netburst / Atom. In this article, we will fast-forward to Fall 1995 and take a look at the appearance of this beautiful processor.

1997 was marked by the appearance of a radically new processor, which you, %username%, must have come across. We are talking about the Intel Pentium II. It was this processor that became extremely popular and gave rise to many different systems — both server and desktop. So pour your coffee, turn on your favorite music from that era, and immerse yourself in the events that took place 24 years ago.

Our starting point is February 26, 1999 years. On this day, Intel introduced its new family of processors — the Intel Pentium III. From a marketing point of view — another breakthrough, the conquest of new heights of productivity and efficiency. But was it technically so? The answers are in this article.

Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin — all these strange names are nothing but the name of revisions of the cores of the most current processor of the late 20th century. In the article, we talk about both the notorious “gigahertz race” and those modifications that contributed to the rapid development of computer technology at the beginning of the millennium.

On November 20, 2000, an event that many were looking forward to: Intel officially introduced the new Pentium — Pentium 4 processors based on the «Willamette» core. The processors of this generation have certainly become commercially successful, but the attitude towards them is extremely controversial. Disputes among researchers of the history of technology and enthusiasts of retrocomputing do not subside to this day.

Two and a half years have passed since the release of the first Pentium 4 «‎Willamette». Two full-fledged generations of the platform, two sockets, two cores and three types of memory have been replaced. Despite not the most successful start, not only commercial success, but also popular recognition came to the “fourth stump”. The new microarchitecture has penetrated all market segments — from budget PCs to multiprocessor servers.

We are talking about a processor that should not have appeared at all, but instead gained incredible popularity and changed the course of history. Of course, you have already read the title and understand that we are talking about the representative of the P6 microarchitecture, the heir to the Pentium III — the mobile processor Intel Pentium M.

And also ask questions in the comments — he will definitely answer everything.

From Elbrus to Pentium. How Intel made its first CPU and what does Soviet scientists have to do with it

The American company Intel is the absolute leader in the general-purpose processor market, including for gaming stations. She was helped to achieve this by two outstanding Soviet and Russian scientists — Vladimir Pentkovsky and Boris Babayan. We tell what contribution they made and where they are now.

Why are we telling this?

The processor is one of the main factors for high performance in games. With the development of the gaming industry, the need for PC resources is also growing. At first, even graphics processing fell on the processors, and this greatly limited the rest of the tasks — mathematical and physical calculations, as well as game logic. With the advent of 3D accelerators and video cards, graphics processing passed to them. Some resources have been freed up, but there are never many of them. Physics and logic become more complex along with graphics, which means that the processor needs more and more productive. Without it, no video card will produce enough frames per second.

Most of the processor market, including desktop computers, has been owned by Intel for more than 25 years.

What do we mean by the term «processor»

The central processing unit is a device responsible for performing arithmetic, logical and control operations written in machine code. That is, in fact, it is the brain of the computer. The very first central processing units were huge cabinets, inside of which there were circuits and assemblies from individual elements. In the 50s, these were relays, ferrite cores and vacuum tubes, in the 60s they were replaced by transistors. The first samples of transistors were large, but over time, the dimensions decreased, which made it possible to make circuits of relatively small dimensions from them — microcircuits.

Over time, microcircuits became smaller and smaller; it became possible to create so-called microprocessors — elements consisting of one or many small microcircuits. Nowadays, it is microprocessors that are called processors, since they have almost completely replaced their «fathers». In addition, small-sized processors became the basis for computers to appear in every home. But in the 70s, when the first microprocessors appeared, this was not yet discussed — they were too expensive. And when the first cheaper samples appeared, PCs based on them did not have high performance, and therefore wide functionality.

At the same time, really powerful processors were used only in supercomputers. In the United States, several private companies were involved in their development at once, and in the USSR — research institutes, including the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering of the Academy of Sciences. The Soviet leadership instructed scientists to copy the American supercomputer Cray, but the work was very slow. A different approach worked much better — to take all the best from another product — the Burroughs B5000 — and supplement it with upgrades of our own design.

In the late 1970s, ITMiVT released a supercomputer, Elbrus. One of the engineers designing computers was Boris Artashesovich Babayan, and the basic language for him was written by Vladimir Mstislavovich Pentkovsky. Computers were based on processors with a superscalar architecture that allowed the execution of two or more independent instructions per clock cycle. A similar technology was used in the American supercomputer CDC 6600, released in 1963, but Soviet scientists were the first to tell the general public about this principle. The fact that the USSR was ahead of its competitors is also confirmed by Keith Diefendorff, one of the developers of the first Western mass superscalar processor Motorola MC88100, in the February issue of Microprocessor Report for 1999 year. According to him, a scheme similar to Elbrus was applied in the west only after almost 15 years.

Later, Elbrus-2 appeared — an improved Elbrus, which became the most massive supercomputer in the USSR. In the mid-80s, the development of Elbrus-3 began under the leadership of Babayan. Among other improvements, it supported the Intel processor code emulator, which means it could use Western software. At the same time, productivity fell only by 10-30%. At the same time, Pentkovsky led the development of a separate processor — «El-90». It was based on the solutions that were used in the creation of Elbrus-2 and Elbrus-3.

In the same period, Intel began its development. It was founded in 1968, but at first it hardly participated in the development of supercomputers. Intel started with the production of chips, and three years after its founding, it made the first microprocessor available to the masses — Intel 4004. It was used in microcalculators, and the next chip — Intel 8008 — was put on bottling production lines, I / O terminals and the same calculators . Its later products were used in desktop computers, but their functionality was far from what we are used to.

Brain drain

Perestroika began in the USSR in the late 1980s. The country was not up to processors, and there was a critical lack of money to finance development. But the team of scientists from ITMiVT continued to work on improving Elbrus-3 and El-90, as much as possible. At the same time, the iron curtain collapsed, secrecy fell, and Soviet developers got the opportunity to cooperate with foreign companies, including American ones.

By that time, one simplified working prototype of Elbrus-3 and an engineering sample of El-9 had already been created0″. There was simply no way to bring them to mind — in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, the economic crisis began. But two years earlier, Intel employees came to Moscow to visit the Laboratory of Computing Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and from there invited Pentkovsky to the United States for an «exchange of experience.» Immediately after the collapse of the USSR and the cessation of funding for the development of his own processors, he finally moved to the United States, where he became one of the leading engineers at Intel.

At the same time, at the start of the 90s, the rapid development of personal computers began — any more or less wealthy person could afford them. In addition, the Internet, operating systems with great capabilities and multimedia appeared. The PC market is becoming increasingly competitive. Intel, as one of the leaders in this industry, has launched the development of a fundamentally new processor — the Pentium. At the time of release at 19In 1993, it surpassed any competitor and allowed the company to break into the lead in the mainstream desktop processor market.

Apparently, Pentkovsky was directly involved in its development: many of the solutions used in El-90 were used there as well. For example, separate caches of commands and data, as well as the ultra-reliable computing mode, implemented back in Elbrus-2. In the USSR, it was created at the request of the army — several processors in one system compared the results of calculations and recalculated them if they did not converge. In addition, the Pentium had the performance monitoring tools that El-9 had.0″, but not others.

The

Pentium was Intel’s first commercially successful superscalar processor. After it, all general-purpose processors use superscalarity, including modern multi-core ones. The only exceptions are Intel Atom and the like — they are made for battery-powered mobile devices. But they are not suitable for any more or less serious task, including games.

Officially, Pentkovsky started working at Intel in 1993, just when the Pentium came out. And if his direct participation in the development of the first model can only be indirectly proved, then the Pentium III was definitely developed by him — Intel itself signed Pentkovsky as the head of the architecture development. There is also a legend that the processor was named Pentium just in honor of the Russian scientist, but the official version of Intel is different — the name comes from Penta, which means “five”. After all, the Pentium is a fifth-generation processor.

Babayan, after the collapse of the USSR, founded the MCST company, where he continued to develop his processors. In 1991, he entered into a cooperation contract with the American company Sun Microsystems — together they began to develop chips on the SPARK architecture, which was used by Sun. Part of the proceeds went to work on a fundamentally new processor — the 64-bit Elbrus-2000 or E2k. At the same time, Intel, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard, launched work on its product — Itanium (code name — Merced). Its design frequency was 800 MHz, the volume of the third level cache was from 2 to 4 MB, and the TDP was 60 watts.

But Babayan and his team prepared something better. At the Microprocessor Forum in February 1999, he stated that E2k was vastly superior to Merced in every way. There was only one caveat — Babayan did not even have an engineering sample. The processor existed only in the description in the Verilog language — in fact, this is the final stage before creating the topology and transferring it to the chip. E2k theoretically ran at 1.2 GHz, outperformed Itanium three times in integer calculations and five times in floating point. At the same time, the crystal dimensions and the TDP level were smaller. In addition, unlike the American competitor, it had compatibility with 32-bit instructions.

E2k never started production. Babayan did not even find the money to create the first batch, despite the fact that at the next conferences, it was not he who spoke about the new Elbrus, but the head of Microsoft’s research division, Gordon Bell. But no one dared to invest in the mass production of E2k. No one was sure that things would work out and someone would be able to move Intel, which by that time had become the absolute leader in the processor market.

But in the end, Itanium did not take root on personal computers — its architecture supported only 64-bit instructions. The release was delayed by two years, by which time AMD had released the AMD64 extension, which allowed 32-bit programs to run in 64-bit mode. Plus, the price of Itanium, due to the lack of distribution and complexity of the architecture, was prohibitive — from $ 1.2 thousand to $ 4 thousand. It was installed only on servers that were used for tasks with parallel computing.

Current state of affairs

In 2004, 500 MCST employees, together with Boris Babayan, moved to Intel. Prior to this, the American company had already worked in Russia for 12 years, but after the transfer of Babayan and his colleagues, the staff of the Russian division doubled. At the same time, Intel got the opportunity to use more than a hundred US patents protecting Elbrus architectural solutions. Babayan himself explained the move to Intel as the only way to bring a good idea to its commercial implementation:

“When we were negotiating with Intel, we realized that we might not have to do exactly what we have done so far. However, after getting acquainted with the company’s development plan, we saw so many new ideas and applications for our knowledge and experience that we agreed without hesitation. Of course, working with industry leaders is a mutually enriching process and the only way to bring a good idea to its commercial implementation. We are pleased that in a few years our developments will become part of the most massive computer systems in the world.”

At Intel, Babayan holds the position of director of architecture for the software solutions division. He became the first European scientist to be awarded the Intel Fellow title — it is awarded for contribution to the development of the information technology industry. In addition to it, 85 employees of the company, which employs about 85 thousand people around the world, received Intel Fellow.

As a result, the MCST lost many valuable personnel, including the supervisor, as well as intellectual property. Despite this, the development of Elbrus did not stop.