Pentium and multimedia

The Pentium replaced the 486 in 1993 and made superscalar execution mainstream. PCI killed VESA local bus. CD-ROM became standard, then DVD. 3dfx, then NVIDIA, made the GPU a real thing. AOL discs arrived in the mail by the truckload. AMD's K6 and original Athlon turned what had been a near-monopoly into a real race; by 1999, Athlon hit 1 GHz first, and Intel never quite recovered the swagger.

• 
  1993

  Original Intel Pentium PC

  Intel (chip) — many OEMs (system) · Intel Pentium @ 60 / 66 MHz (Socket 4, then Socket 5/7)

  The first superscalar x86 — two integer pipelines, a fast on-die FPU.

• 
  1997

  Pentium MMX

  Intel · Pentium MMX @ 166 / 200 / 233 MHz (Socket 7)

  The same Pentium core with 57 new SIMD instructions for multimedia workloads (audio, video, image processing) and an enlarged L1 cache.

• 
  1997

  Intel Pentium II

  Intel · Pentium II @ 233 – 450 MHz (Slot 1 SECC cartridge)

  Intel moved off the traditional socket and onto a daughtercard called Slot 1, with the cache on a separate die at a fraction of core speed.

• 
  1999

  Original AMD Athlon

  AMD · Athlon @ 500 – 700 MHz (Slot A cartridge, K7 core)

  AMD's first ground-up CPU after the K6, designed in part by former DEC Alpha engineers.