brassicGamer wrote:Hmm... somehow you are inadvertently proving my point for me ;) […]
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Hmm... somehow you are inadvertently proving my point for me 😉
The first link states the CPU name as P5 and only puts 586 in brackets, I believe, to make it clear to the lay reader that this is the next generation CPU but no the official name. And I'll simply quote from the second link:
(It is not called the 80586 because last year when Intel was suing a rival manufacturer, AMD, for selling chips called 80386s, a judge ruled that unlike a name, a number cannot be copyrighted or trademarked.)
No matter why it was called the Pentium, it was never formally called the 586 by anyone 'in the know'.
I don't know how you get that from these articles that both clearly state 586.
It was the '586' to everyone because that's what people expected, including Intel. It didn't become 'Pentium' or 'P5' until the judge made that particular ruling.
You initially said:
"In reality the Pentium was never referred to as a 586 - even before it was dubbed the Pentium it was known in the press as the P5"
'In the press' is not formally, but the press did indeed refer to it as 586 or 80586 before the Pentium or P5 names were eventually coined.
Examples:
https://books.google.nl/books?id=gFAEAAAAMBAJ … l%20586&f=false
https://books.google.nl/books?id=fpQP3e54P-gC … l%20586&f=false
https://books.google.nl/books?id=f1AEAAAAMBAJ … l%20586&f=false
brassicGamer wrote:On a purely technical note protected mode was completely flawed on the 286
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.
brassicGamer wrote:My point is that all the competing chips were clones and therefore any CPU of that generation was a 'legit' 386.
There never were 'legit' clones of the 386.
Intel's second-source license only covered 8088 through 286.
There was no clone of the 386 during its generation. However, when Intel had already launched its 4th generation 486, AMD and some others started to reverse-engineer and clone the 386, and sell it as a '386'.
Not 'legit', but they were the same architecture.
brassicGamer wrote:There is no other legit Pentium.
There is no other legit 386 or 486 either.
I don't understand this criterion.
brassicGamer wrote:Only other manufacturers could or would call their chip a 586 because they weren't clones - they were similar, but each was fundamentally different in some way.
The only reason they weren't clones was because Intel shut down cloning with the AMD lawsuit.
So it was no longer the same playfield.
If it was, I'm 100% sure that every clone maker would just go the easy way and do a 100% carbon-copy of the Pentium circuit, as they did before.
brassicGamer wrote:Okay then let's look at the scenario where Intel were successful in taking ownership of the 586 name: no one else would be able to call their chip a 586 and the press probably wouldn't get away with it either given Intel's legal oompf, so only Intel's chip would be called a 586. I'm just trying to illustrate that, until the Pentium happened, everything else was a Intel clone. It's nothing to do with the difference between the i486 or the P5 and all to do with the fact that nothing else was a Pentium.
It's a legal thing, as I said before. The timeline is like this:
8088-286: Official second-source licensing, therefore everyone was allowed to use the same designs and trademarks.
386-486: No second-source license in-place, so manufacturers started reverse-engineering the CPUs themselves, so they could still sell their own 'copies'. This is illegitimate of course.
The 386 cloning started at about the time that Intel had launched the 486, and started work on the Pentium.
So all the lawsuits against AMD and others were ongoing at the time Intel was working on the Pentium.
Somewhere in 1991, AMD and Intel finally finished their legal battle, and AMD could finally get their 386 clones on the market (after having to replace the copied microcode with a clean-room reimplemented version, but Intel could not enforce trademark rights on the 386 name).
This changed everything, both Intel's naming scheme, and also the approach that other x86-manufacturers would take. They knew that they'd get tied up in court for years everytime they'd downright clone an Intel CPU. That was not a viable business model. So they had to start designing their own.
Other factors could include that it became increasingly difficult to reverse-engineer and clone the chips as they got more complex.
But the name? Hardly.