Jan Engelhardt wrote:
quoted text
> On Saturday 2008-05-03 19:39, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>> great. So this NOP is indeed not generally known to all "P6 and later" 
>>> CPUs. (the PII)
>> Looks like. My analysis was wrong, as I got the P6 vs. PII/PIII
>> confused :) Damn unintutive numbering, I thought ARM is worse but I'm
>> not so sure anymore.
> 
> Guess that Intel named it Pentium II either because Hexium
> ("5"86:Pentium, "6"86:Hexium) would have been a strange name, or the
> successor to the Pentium/586 was not that great an improvement.
> Or something else? Always kept me wondering.

Yeah, "Hexium" didn't quite work, and they thought they'd already gotten 
a working brand with "Pentium".  That it clashed with their previous 
public prerelease naming scheme of P+number ("P", I believe, for 
"project" or "processor") didn't matter.

The Pentium 4 is properly called the P7, but almost noone calls it that.

"Pentium" is also a highly unstable isotope of hydrogen (Hydrogen-5), 
with a half-life under a zeptosecond.

	-hpa
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