I have a hard time remembering what computers I had in the 1990s now. I had an 8086 in the 1980s. I think the next one I had was a 486/33 in the early 90s and I had this for years. I remember having a Cyrix 586 at some point later. I think the next jump was in the early 2000s and I honestly don't rmeember what that CPU was so I can't say when I got my first 1GHz+ CPU. Probably that 2002 PC. No idea what it was now. But it did survive in some form for another 12 years.

Fun fact #1: many today may not know that the only reason switched to the Pentium name was because a court ruled that they couldn't trademark a number and AMD had cross-licensed the microarchitecture and instruction set to AMD and Cyrix.

It was the Pentium 4 when clock speeds went insane and became a huge marketing point even though Pentium chips had lower IPC than Athlons (at that time). There was a belief that CPUs would keep going to 10GHz+. Instead they hit a ceiling at about ~3GHz, that's barely increased to this day (ignoring burst modes).

Intel originally intended to move workstations and servers to the EPIC architecture (eg Merced was an early chip in this series). This began in the 1990s but was years delayed and required writing software a very particular way. It never delievered on its promise.

And AMD, thanks to the earlier cross-licensing agreement, just ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon 64 starting in 2003 by adding the x86_64 instructions, which we still use today.

Fun Fact #2: it was the Pentium 3 that saved Intel's hide long after it was discontinued in favor of the Pentium 4.

The early 2000s were the nascent era of multi-core CPUs. The Pentium 3 had survived in mobile chips and become the Pentium-M and then the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo later). This was the Centrino platform and included wireless (IIRC 802.11b/g). The Pentium 4 hit the Gigahertz ceiling and EPIC wasn't going to happen to Intel went back to the drawing board, revived the mobile Pentium-3 platform, adding AMD's 64 bit instructions and released their desktop CPUs. Even modern Intel CPUs are in many ways a derivation of the Pentium-3 [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors