Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry

Author here for your Pentium questions :-)

Why wasn’t the Pentium’s successor the Sexium?

Ha ha. Internally, the successor to the Pentium (P5) had the codename P6, but it was called the Pentium Pro externally rather than anything six-related.

Instead, Intel decided to go with an incomprehensible system of naming: Pentium Overdrive, Pentium MMX, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium III Xeon, Pentium D, Pentium M, Pentium Extreme Edition, etc. Good luck trying to figure out the ordering of these processors.

Intel's bad naming is still shooting them in the foot today. For a company that butters their bread by selling new products, they're doing a spectacularly bad job of letting people know what the new hotness is.

I hear things like "What do you mean it's slow? It's an i7!" or "It can't be slow -- it's a Xeon!" from too many people in the wild.

To them, the first number is the important one. What they see is that it is still an i7 and therefore they think it must be still be (relatively) fast, even if their second-gen i7-2600 is demonstrably pretty slow.

I tried once to explain how Intel's numbering system has worked to a friend. I failed pretty miserably. I even used a whiteboard. I couldn't convey what needed to be conveyed in order to explain why his computer (an i7) wasn't keeping up with the tasks he gave to it.

But I can convey the problem simply enough in this crowd, here on HNN: What's faster, a "Core i3-9100" or a "Core i7-2600"?

(At least with 286, 386, 486, and Pentium, the nomenclature was much more digestible.)