The name Pentium is originally derived from the Greek word pente (πέντε), meaning "five" (as the original Pentium processors used Intel's fifth-generation microarchitecture, the P5), and the Latin ending -ium. The current Pentium processors only share the name but are in fact based on the same processor chips that are used in the Intel Core but are typically used with a lower clock frequency, a partially disabled L3 cache and some of the advanced features such as hyper-threading and virtualization disabled.
History
The original Pentium branded CPUs were expected to be named 586 or i586, to follow the naming convention of previous generations (286, i386, i486). However, as the company wanted to prevent their competitors from branding their processors with similar names (as AMD had done with their Am486), Intel attempted to file a trademark on the name in the United States, only to be denied because a series of numbers was not considered distinct.[3]
Following Intel's previous series of 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors, the company's first P5-based microprocessor was released as the original Intel Pentium on March 22, 1993. Marketing firm Lexicon Branding was hired to coin a name for the new processor. The suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element,[4] while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86.[3]
Due to its success, the Pentium brand would continue through