Starting with the 80386, microprocessors have been increasingly focused towards GUI environments, and more recently toward multimedia processing on the Internet.
The 80486 represented the first step towards a true GUI environment. This processor was optimized for a Microsoft Windows environment, and could multi-task better than its predecessor, the 80386. This microprocessor also introduced a math co-processor. This separate processor sped up the computing because it could process complex mathematical equations previously handled by the MPU (Micro Processing Unit).
The Intel 80486 quickly became one of the most popular microprocessors ever, and was sold with virtually every computer system sold. However, companies such as AMD sold their own 80486-based systems at a lower price than the Intel versions, but they simply called them 80486 microprocessors. This created confusion in the marketplace, as some computer dealers would use an inferior 80486 MPU as opposed to a genuine Intel 80486, and would still call it a 80486 computer, leading the consumer to believe that they were buying an Intel MPU.
In 1993, four years after the invention of the 80486 computer, Intel released their new microprocessor, the Pentium. This microprocessor was named "Pentium" because Intel could copyright this name, and therefore, the problem of imitation brands was eliminated.
The Intel Pentium was designed to allow "real word" multimedia data to be easily processed. The Pentium was vastly superior to the 80486, eventually having four times the clockspeed of the 80486. The real advancement of the Pentium was in the inclusion of the MMX instruction set introduced in 1997. This new instruction set allowed developers to reduce the computation required in repetitive loops, found mainly in multimedia. MMX also introduced several new instructions to make the processing of video, audio, and graphical displays more effecient.
During the period of the Pentium, Intel released a new MPU specifically designed for processing large quantities of data. This processor was called the Pentium Pro. This processor had higher clock speeds than the Pentium processors, and introduced a cache called the L2. This L2 cache was much larger than the L1 cache, operated at high speeds, and greatly improved the speed of the processor.
In the year that MMX was released, Intel released a new processor called Pentium II. This chip was simply a combination of the Pentium Pro with MMX. Similarily, the Intel Celeron processor was created by taking the Pentium II chip, and removing the L2 cache. The Celeron processor is still sold today as a value processor.
In 1999, Intel released their next MPU, the Pentium III. This processor introduced 70 new instructions, specifically designed for multimedia content on the Internet, and for three-dimensional games. These new instructions are called "Internet Streaming SIMD extensions", and they allow the user to significantly enhance their Internet experiences with web sites that support the extensions. Pentium III MPUs currently are available at speeds of 1.13 gHz.
Computer MPUs have greatly improved over the last few years, and will likely continue to improve exponentially in performance in the next few years.