During development, Intel generally identifies processors with codenames, such as Prescott, Willamette, Coppermine, Katmai, Klamath, or Deschutes.

However, as the firm wanted to prevent their competitors from branding their processors with similar names (as AMD had done with their Am486), Intel filed a trademark application on the name in the United States, but was denied because a series of numbers was considered to lack trademark distinctiveness.

The suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element,[6] while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86.

With the 2006 introduction of the Intel Core brand as the company's new flagship line of processors, the Pentium series was to be discontinued.

[11][12][13] In 2009, the "Dual-Core" suffix was dropped, and new x86 processors started carrying the plain Pentium name again.

Pentium Silver targets low-power devices and shares architecture with Atom and Celeron, while Pentium Gold targets entry-level desktops and uses existing architecture, such as Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake.

It introduced out-of-order execution and an integrated second-level cache on dual-chip processor package.

In 2000, Intel introduced a new microarchitecture named NetBurst, with a much longer pipeline enabling higher clock frequencies than the P6-based processors.

This eventually replaced all NetBurst-based processors across the four brands Celeron, Pentium, Core, and Xeon.

On January 7, 2010, Intel launched a new Pentium model using the Clarkdale chip in parallel with other desktop and mobile CPUs based on their new Westmere microarchitecture.

In the Pentium series, some features of Clarkdale are disabled, including AES-NI, hyper-threading (versus Core i3), and the graphics controller in the Pentium runs at 533 MHz, while in the Core i3 i3-5xx series they run at 733 MHz, and Dual Video Decode that enables Blu-ray picture-in picture hardware acceleration, and support for Deep Color and xvYCC.

[citation needed] The memory controller in the Pentium supports DDR3-1066 max, the same as the Core i3 i3-5xx series.

Features include a clock speed of 3.5 GHz with four threads, 3 MB of L3 cache and Intel HD 610 integrated graphics.

All Coffee Lake Pentium processors support Hyper-threading,[23] and integrated Intel UHD Graphics.

All Comet Lake Pentium processors support Hyper-threading, and integrated Intel UHD 610 Graphics.

Due to its prominence, the term "Pentium-compatible" is often used to describe any x86 processor that supports the IA-32 instruction set and architecture.