Intel released its first Pentium chip on this day 33 years ago, came packing 3.1 million transistors — fifth-gen x86 chip built on an 800nm process

Intel Pentium A80501 66MHz SX950 Die Image.

33 years ago today, the Pentium lineage began, shaping decades of personal computing to come. The Pentium was Intel’s first superscalar design, an architectural feature that enabled the execution of multiple instructions per cycle. This would give it a boost in performance beyond its predecessor(s) despite the pedestrian sounding launch SKU clocks. Intel’s first P5/i586 architecture chips were the Pentium 60 and Pentium 66.

(Image credit: Intel)