Pentium 100 Specs

• The Pentium 100 microprocessor was created by Intel as a successor for the original Pentium, a fifth generation microprocessor that continued the x86 line of processors. It allowed for backwards compatibility with older chips based on the 80286-80486 chips and originally came in 50Mhhz (Megahertz) and 66Mhz configurations. Introduced in 1993, the chip was to spawn a long line of chips, with newer iterations of Intel's chips being named Pentium II, III and IV. The Pentium 100 was introduced the following year and represented an incremental upgrade, offering a faster clock speed but no other improvements.

Physical Specifications

• The Pentium 100 chip features 3.2 million transistors and is designed to fit one of two types of motherboard sockets, either a "socket 5" or a "socket 7." The sockets featured either a 320-pin or 321-pin configuration and the chip was capable of operating at temperatures ranging from zero to 70 degrees Celsius. The chip itself has 296 pins and measures 1.95 inches by 195 inches.

Internal Specifications

• The Pentium chip was the first superscalar chip from Intel, which allowed it to function in some ways as if it had two separate chips built into a single chip (in much the same way that Intel's "Core" line of chips actually have multiple cores). However, unlike multi-core chips, the Pentium 100 was merely designed to execute more than one instruction at a time, rather than providing a true experience of two separate chips. The chip runs at a speed of 100Mhz internally and speaks to the computer with a front bus speed of either 66 or 50Mhz. The chip was manufactured using a 0.6 micron silicon printing process.

Special Features

• The Pentium 100 chip offers a number of special features, including an optional upgrade to Pentium overdrive, allowing it to run at 166Mhz. The chip also features MMX coding, which was designed by Intel to provide multimedia extensions (the term stands for Multimedia eXtensions) for chips beginning with the 80386 chip. The chip also has power management features, allowing it to control the amount of power it draws, depending on where it is installed, and includes an 8KB (Kilobyte) level 1 cache, which makes the chip run faster by placing a small amount of memory directly onto the chip itself.