Intel Vpro:

Intel vPro technology is a set of features built into a PC’s motherboard and other hardware. Intel vPro is not the PC itself, nor is it a single set of management features (such as Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT)) for sys-admins. Intel vPro is a combination of processor technologies, hardware enhancements, management features, and security technologies that allow remote access to the PC -- including monitoring, maintenance, and management -- independently of the state of the operating system (OS) or power state of the PC. Intel vPro is intended to help businesses gain certain maintenance and servicing advantages, security improvements, and cost benefits in information technology (IT) areas.

Security and Intel vPro PCs:

vPro security technologies and methodologies are designed into the PC’s chipset and other system hardware. Because the vPro security technologies are designed into system hardware instead of software, they are less vulnerable to hackers, computer viruses, computer worms, and other threats that typically affect an OS or software applications installed at the OS level (such as virus scan, antispyware, inventory, and other security or management applications).

For example, during deployment of vPro PCs, security credentials, keys, and other critical information are stored in protected memory (not on the hard disk drive), and erased when no longer needed.

Intel Centrino:

Centrino is a platform-marketing initiative from Intel. It is not a mobile CPU - rather, the term covers a particular combination of mainboard chipset, mobile CPU and wireless network interface in the design of a laptop personal computer. Intel claimed that systems equipped with these technologies should deliver better performance, longer battery life and broad wireless network interoperability.

Marketing:
Intel has reportedly invested US$300 million in Centrino advertising. Because of the ubiquity of the marketing campaign, many consumers mistakenly refer to Pentium M and Intel Core processors as "Centrinos". Many consumers have received the impression that only Centrino provides wireless connectivity in a laptop.

The Centrino marketing program has been widely assumed to be responsible for the success of Intel laptop PCs.

To qualify for a Centrino label, laptop vendors must use all three Intel qualified parts under each platform, otherwise using only the processor and chipset will carry the Pentium M, Pentium Dual-Core, Celeron, Intel Core or Intel Core 2 label instead.

Rise mP6:

The MP6 was a microprocessor designed by Rise Technology to compete with the Intel Pentium line. The firm spent 5 years developing the processor. Announced in 1998, the chip never achieved widespread use, and Rise quietly exited the market in December of the following year. Like competitors Cyrix and IDT, Rise found it was unable to compete with Intel and AMD.
Silicon Integrated Systems licensed the MP6 technology, and used it in the SiS550, a system-on-a-chip that integrated the MP6 CPU, the north and south bridges, and sound and video on a single chip. The SiS550 saw use in some compact PCs and in consumer devices such as DVD players.

NexGen Nx586:

NexGen (Milpitas, CA) was a private semiconductor company that designed x86 PC central processing units until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. NexGen chips were compatible with the x86 instruction set, but were not x86 clones of Intel's chips, operating internally with a version of RISC architecture dubbed "RISC86". Like competitor Cyrix, NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division.

The company was started in 1986, and founded by Thampy Thomas, Brad Smith, Mac McFarland, and Ashok Jain. Initially, it was funded by Olivetti, Compaq, ASCII and Kleiner Perkins. Its first design was targeted at the 80386 generation of processors. But the design was so large and complicated it could only be implemented using eight chips instead of three as the 386/385/387 designed used and was initially built using 0.8-um, Bi-CMOS. In 1986, CMOS as we know it today was not yet a widely used and standard chip process. As the team and funding grew the chip design moved to smaller and smaller geometries (from .8-um through .5,.35, .25-um) changed fab partners several times and architectures from complex instruction set (CISC) to reduced instruction sets (RISC) and tracked the Intel's X86 product line 80486 and Pentium generations. Intel had copyrighted their instruction set so NexGen devised a strategy to offer the processor only as a motherboard-based, multiprocessor system in order to compete. Later, when RISC became the dominate architecture, the company determined that it could compete directly in the microprocessor business.
Its second design, the Nx586 CPU, was introduced in 1994, was the first CPU to attempt to compete directly against Intel's Pentium, with its Nx586-P80 and Nx586-P90 CPUs. Unlike competing chips from AMD and Cyrix, the Nx586 was not pin-compatible with the Pentium or any other Intel chip and required its own custom NxVL-based motherboard and chipset. NexGen offered both a VLB and a PCI motherboard for the Nx586 chips.
Like the later Pentium-class CPUs from AMD and Cyrix, clock for clock it was more efficient than the Pentium, so the P80 ran at 75 MHz and the P90 ran at 84 MHz. Unfortunately for NexGen, it measured its performance relative to a Pentium using an early chipset; improvements included in Intel's first Triton chipset increased the Pentium's performance relative to the Nx586 and NexGen had difficulty keeping up. Unlike the Pentium, the Nx586 had no built-in math coprocessor; an optional Nx587 provided this functionality.
In later Nx586's, a x86 math coprocessor was included on-chip. Using IBM's multichip module (MCM) technology, NexGen combined the 586 and 587 die in a single package. The new device, which used the same pinout as its predecessor, was marketed as the Nx586-PF100 to distinguish it from the FPU-less Nx586-P100.
Compaq, which had backed the company financially, announced its intention to use the Nx586 and even struck the name "Pentium" from its product literature, demos, and boxes, substituting the "586" moniker, but never used NexGen's chip widely.
When AMD's K5 chip failed to meet performance and sales expectations, AMD purchased NexGen for $980M, largely to get the design team and the Nx586's follow-up design, which became the basis for the commercially successful AMD K6.

Winchip c6:

The WinChip series was a low-power Socket 7-based x86 processor designed by Centaur Technology and marketed by its parent company IDT.

The design of the WinChip was quite different from other processors of the time. Instead of a large gate count and die area, IDT, using experience from the RISC processor market, created a small and electrically efficient processor. In fact, Winchip had much in common with the 80486, because of its single pipeline, in-order execution, and CISC architecture. It was of much simpler design than that of its competition, such as AMD K5/K6 and Intel Pentium II, which were based on superscalar RISC x86 decoder approaches with advanced instruction reordering (out of order execution) and multiple pipelines.
WinChip was, in general, designed to perform well with popular applications that didn't do much (if any) floating point calculations. This included operating systems of the time and the majority of software used in businesses. It was also designed to be a drop-in replacement for the more complex, and thus more expensive, processors it was competing with. This allowed IDT/Centaur to take advantage of an established system platform (Intel's Socket 7).
WinChip 2A added fractional multipliers and adopted a 100 MHz front side bus to improve memory access and L2 cache performance. It also adopted the performance rating concept, similar to how AMD and Cyrix marketed their processors. This method of specifying processor performance helped consumers understand where the WinChip's performance fit in against Intel's competing products. Another revision (2B) was also planned, with a die shrink to 0.25 μm, but was shipped in limited numbers. A third WinChip was planned as well, this one receiving a doubled L1 cache, but that CPU never made it to market.
The industry's move away from Socket 7 and the release of the Intel Celeron processor signalled the end of the WinChip. In 1999, the Centaur Technology division of IDT was sold to VIA. Although VIA initially branded processors as "Cyrix," the company initially used technology similar to WinChip with its Cyrix III line.

AMD Cyrix Cx5x86:

Cyrix Cx5x86 was Released in August 1995, four months before the more famous Cyrix 6x86, the Cyrix 5x86 was one of the fastest CPUs ever produced for Socket 3 computer systems. With better performance in most applications than an Intel Pentium processor at 75 MHz, the Cyrix Cx5x86 filled a gap by providing a medium-performance processor option for aging 486 Socket 3 motherboards (which are incapable of handling Intel's Pentium CPUs, apart from the Pentium Overdrive).
The Cyrix 5x86 processor, codename "M1sc", was based on a scaled-down version of the "M1" core used in the Cyrix 6x86, which provided 80% of the performance for a 50% decrease in transistors over the 6x86 design. It had the 32-bit memory bus of an ordinary 486 processor, but internally had much more in common with fifth-generation processors such as the Cyrix 6x86, the AMD K5, and the Intel Pentium, and even the sixth-generation Intel Pentium Pro. The chip featured near-complete support for i486 instructions, but very limited support for Pentium instructions. Interestingly, some performance-enhancing features of the cpu were intentionally disabled due to potentially stability-threatening bugs which were not fixed before release time (these features can be enabled with freely-downloadable software utilities; see below).
The similarly-named SGS-Thomson ST5x86 and IBM IBM5x86C were licensed rebrandings of the Cyrix design (IBM and ST physically produced Cyrix's CPUs for them), marketed separately but identical for practical purposes, apart from the availability of a 75 MHz edition which Cyrix did not bring to market, and slight differences in voltage requirements. The Cyrix 5x86 design, however, should not be confused with the similarly-named AMD Am5x86 which was essentially a fast 486 (not an all-new design like the Cyrix part) but which had broadly similar performance, used the same Socket 3, and was introduced at the end of the same year.

AMD's K5:

The K5 was AMD's first x86 processor developed entirely in-house, introduced in March 1996. Its primary competition was Intel's Pentium microprocessor range. Although it was originally scheduled for launch in 1995, due to design issues, it was delayed until 1996. AMD as a company was not as mature as Intel regarding microprocessor design, thus a lot of deadlines were missed and there was a lack of manufacturing expertise in scaling designs. The K5's was an ambitious design, closer to a Pentium Pro than a Pentium regarding technical solutions and internal architecture. However, the final product was regrettably closer to the Pentium regarding performance.

Technical details:

The K5 was based upon an internal highly parallel 29k RISC processor architecture with an x86 decoding front-end. The K5 offered good x86 compatibility. All models had 4.3 million transistors, with five integer units that could process instructions out of order and one floating point unit. The branch target buffer was four times the size of the Pentium's and register renaming improved parallel performance of the pipelines. The chips speculative execution of instructions reduced pipeline stall. It touted an instruction cache of 16 KiB, which was double that of the Pentium. Further, the primary cache was a "4-way" set associative, instead of the Pentium's "2-way" set. The K5 lacked MMX instructions, which Intel started offering in its Pentium MMX processors that were launched in early 1997. Compared to the Pentium the K5's floating point unit had around 10% less performance clock for clock.
Performance

The K5 project represented an early chance for AMD to take technical leadership from Intel. Although the chip addressed the right design concepts, the actual engineering implementation had its issues. The low clock rates were, in part, due to AMD's limitations as a "cutting edge" manufacturing company at the time, in part due to the design itself (many levels of logic, thus slowing it down). Having a branch prediction unit four times the size of the Pentium, yet reportedly not delivering superior performance is an example of how the actual implementation fell short of the projects goals. Additionally, while the K5's floating point performance was better than that of the Cyrix 6x86, it was weaker than that of the Pentium. Because it was late to market and did not meet performance expectations, the K5 never gained the acceptance among large computer manufacturers that the Am486 and AMD K6 enjoyed.

Intel Core 2 Duo:

The Core 2 brand refers to a range of Intel's consumer 64-bit dual-core and 2x2 MCM quad-core CPUs with the x86-64 instruction set, based on the Intel Core microarchitecture, derived from the 32-bit dual-core Yonah laptop processor. (Note: The Yonah's silicon chip or die comprised two interconnected cores, each similar to those branded Pentium M). The 2x2 MCM dual-die quad-core CPU had two separate dual-core dies (CPUs)—next to each other—in one quad-core MCM package. The Core 2 relegated the Pentium brand to a lower-end market, and reunified laptop and desktop CPU lines, which previously had been divided into the Pentium 4, D, and M brands.
The Core microarchitecture returned to lower clock speeds and improved processors' usage of both available clock cycles and power compared with preceding NetBurst of the Pentium 4/D-branded CPUs. Core microarchitecture provides more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, reducing the power consumption of Core 2-branded CPUs, while increasing their processing capacity. Intel's CPUs have varied very wildly in power consumption according to clock speed, architecture and semiconductor process, shown in the CPU_power_dissipation tables.
The Core 2 brand was introduced on July 27, 2006 comprising the Solo (single-core), Duo (dual-core), Quad (quad-core), and Extreme (dual- or quad-core CPUs for enthusiasts) branches, during 2007. Intel Core 2 processors with vPro technology (designed for businesses) include the dual-core and quad-core branches.

Intel Pentium Dual Core:

The Pentium Dual-Core brand refers to lower-end x86-architecture microprocessors from Intel. They are based on either the 32-bit Yonah or (with quite different microarchitectures) 64-bit Merom or Allendale processors targeted at mobile or desktop computers respectively.
In 2006, Intel announced a plan to return the Pentium brand from retirement to the market, as a moniker of low-cost Core architecture processors based on single-core Conroe-L, but with 1 MB cache. The numbers for those planned Pentiums were similar to the numbers of the latter Pentium Dual-Core CPUs, but with the first digit "1", instead of "2", suggesting their single-core functionality. Apparently, a single-core Conroe-L with 1 MB cache was not strong enough to distinguish the planned Pentiums from other planned Celerons, so it was substituted by dual-core CPUs, bringing the "Dual-Core" add-on to the "Pentium" moniker.
The first processors using the brand appeared in notebook computers in early 2007. Those processors, named Pentium T2060, T2080, and T2130, had the 32-bit Pentium M-derived Yonah core, and closely resembled the Core Duo T2050 processor with the exception of having 1 MB L2 cache instead of 2 MB. All three of them had a 533 MHz FSB connecting CPU with memory. "Intel developed the Pentium Dual-Core at the request of laptop manufacturers".
Subsequently, on June 3, 2007, Intel released the desktop Pentium Dual-Core branded processors known as the Pentium E2140 and E2160. A E2180 model was released later in September 2007. These processors support the Intel64 extensions, being based on the newer, 64-bit Allendale core with Core microarchitecture. These closely resembled the Core 2 Duo E4300 processor with the exception of having 1 MB L2 cache instead of 2 MB. Both of them had an 800 MHz FSB. They targeted the budget market above the Intel Celeron (Conroe-L single-core series) processors featuring only 512 kB of L2 cache.

Although using the Pentium name, the Pentium Dual Core is based on the Core technology, which can clearly be seen when comparing the specification to the Pentium D series. For example, the Pentium Dual Core has a maximum of 1MB of L2 Cache while the Pentium D processors can have up to 4MB of L2 Cache. But the major difference is the Pentium Dual Core processors only consume 65W peak while the Pentium D consumes a considerable 130W peak consumption which shows its relation to the Core power saving technology. Despite having a smaller L2 cache, the Pentium dual-core has proven to be much faster than the Pentium D under a variety of CPU intensive applications.

Pentium D Extreme Edition:

The dual-core CPU runs very well with multi-threaded applications typical in transcoding of audio and video, compressing, photo and video editing and rendering, and ray-tracing. The single-threaded applications alone, including most games, do not benefit from the second core of dual-core CPU compared to equally clocked single-core CPU. Nevertheless, the dual-core CPU is useful to run both the client and server processes of a game without noticeable lag in either thread, as each instance could be running on a different core. Furthermore, multi-threaded games benefit from the dual-core CPUs.
As of 2008 many business and gaming applications are optimized for multiple cores. They ran equally well when alone on the Pentium D or older Pentium 4 branded CPUs at the same clock speed. However, the applications rarely run alone on computers under Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD operating systems. In such multitasking environments, when antivirus software or another program is running in the background, or where several CPU-intensive applications are running simultaneously, each core of the Pentium D branded processor can handle different programs, improving the overall performance over its single-core Pentium 4 counterpart.