The original Pentium branded CPUs were expected to be named 586 or i586, to follow the naming convention of previous generations (286, i386, i486). However, as the company wanted to prevent their competitors from branding their processors with similar names, as AMD had done with their Am486, Intel attempted to file a trademark on the name in the United States, only to be denied because a series of numbers was not considered distinct.
Following Intel's previous series of 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors, the company's first P5-based processor was released as the original Intel Pentium on March 22, 1993. Due to its success, the Pentium brand would continue through several generations of high-end processors beyond the original. In 2006, the Pentium brand briefly disappeared from Intel's roadmaps,[3][4] only to re-emerge in 2007.[5]
