Five Gates: The Day Silicon Learned to Think in Parallel

On a Tuesday morning in March 1993, a chip the size of a thumbnail arrives at computer manufacturers around the world — and nothing about the way we live, work, or play will ever quite recover. Inside Intel's first Pentium processor, three million transistors are doing something no chip has done before: thinking in parallel, executing two instructions at once, running at a speed that makes its predecessor feel like a sundial. Today's microsite takes you inside the silicon.

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