CPU Names

Earldom · December 23, 2017

Hello there, first time in this forum, my name is Chriss

I was wondering, where do the CPU's names come from? Names such as Pentium or Athlon, they sound really cool, but where do they come from?

Sorry for my bad English, im from Argentina

Thanks!

PD: I don't know if this is the right place to post this so, sorry for that

mariushm · December 23, 2017

Pentium is a made up word inspired from penta , which comes from the greek word pente, which means FIVE. It was the fifth "series" of processors after 186, 286,386, and 486. Intel wanted to make a bigger difference between them and other processor makers which has names like AMD K6 , K6-2, Cyrix 6x86 etc etc

Athlon also has greek origin , means something like prize of a contest , sports arena , something like that.

More recent product codes are usually geographical locations like mountain peaks, or significant lakes, or stuff like that

For Intel , see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_codenames

For AMD ... i don't have any exact link .. this explains some : http://www.10stripe.com/articles/where-do-they-get-their-codenames.php

Quote

With the K6, they began to get more creative. The K6 family took codenames from the names of characters in the Land Before Time children's movie series (Little Foot, Chomper, Sharptooth). The possibly-apocryphal story goes that this was the suggestion of an AMD engineer's child.

For the Athlon family, AMD called on the names of a variety of cars; the British Argon make, Ford Orion, Ford Thunderbird, Triumph Spitfire, and Chevrolet Corvette. For the follow-on Athlon XP and MP family, they switched to horses and things related to horses. And so we had chips named after various breeds and kinds of horses (Palomino, Thoroughbred, Morgan) as well as individual horses (Sir Barton, Applebred).

For the Athlon 64 and Opteron family, which are built on the microarchitecture known as either K8 or Hammer, AMD briefly used types of hammers as codenames (Clawhammer, Sledgehammer).

Apparently realizing that there are only so many types of hammers with which the average person is familiar, they immediately changed course. Borrowing a concept from Intel, they began using the names of cities across the world. They used quite a large number of names in very little time: Newcastle, San Diego, Georgetown, Lancaster, Paris, Brisbane, and many more. Dual-core Opterons briefly flirted with using country names instead (Denmark, Egypt), then reverted back (Santa Rosa, Santa Anna, Barcelona).

Through all of this they have also been developing their various "platforms", combinations of a processor and other components, which have usually been named for very mundane objects (Spider, Kite).

AMD's most recent product family is the Phenom, and once again they have a new source of codenames. AMD marketing literature has sometimes refered to these as the Stars family, because they are named for stars. The first out of the gate have been Agena (another name for Beta Centauri) and Toliman (another name for Alpha Centauri).