Intel Pentium no more…

I did a quick post over at PTB about the news that Intel will be dropping the Pentium brand. See full entry at PTB.

While the Pentium has been around for more than a decade, I don’t see any good reason for Intel to part with it. I can still remember the first time I saw a Pentium PC back in first year college (the 486 class was most popular then). My dormmate’s PC was the new Intel Pentium 100 with 32 MB of RAM and 1.2GB hard drive. It was way faster than my Cyrix 486 DX4-100 Acer laptop with 320MB HDD and 8MB RAM (which I was able to pump to 16MB with memory compression).

Whenever a friend or a relative asked for help in buying a new PC and ask them what they specifically want, they just say “get me a Pentium”. I’d offer that an AMD is as good and cheaper and they say “but the Pentium is faster”.

To the common household who don’t know much, the Pentium is to the PC is like Colgate is to toothpaste, Gillete is to blades, Isalander is to tsinelas (footwear) and Cokes (pronounced as koks) is to softdrinks.