| Pentium Pro Central processing unit |
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 Pentium Pro with 256 KB L2-Cache |
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| Produced: | November 1, 1995 |
| Manufacturer: | Intel |
| Max CPU clock: | 150 MHz to 200 MHz |
| FSB speeds: | 60 MHz to 66 MHz |
| Min feature size: | 0. Events 996 - Emperor Otto III issues a deed to Gottschalk Bishop of Freising which is the oldest known document using the name Ostarrîchi Year 1995 ( MCMXCV) was a Common year starting on Sunday. Events of 1995 The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. In Personal computers the Front Side Bus ( FSB) is the bus that carries data between the CPU and the northbridge. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. 35 µm to 0. A micrometre ( American spelling: micrometer; symbol µm) is one millionth of a Metre, or equivalently one thousandth of a Millimetre 50 µm |
| Instruction set: | x86 |
| Microarchitecture: | P6 |
| Cores: | 1 |
| Socket: | Socket 8 |
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation (P6 core) x86 architecture microprocessor produced by Intel in November 1995, and it was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. An instruction set is a list of all the instructions and all their variations that a processor can execute See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal In Computer engineering, microarchitecture (sometime abbreviated to µarch or uarch is a description of the Electrical circuitry of a Computer, Central The P6 Microarchitecture is the sixth generation Intel X86 Microprocessor architecture released in 1995. A multi-core processor (or chip-level multiprocessor, CMP) combines two or more independent cores into a single package composed of a single Integrated Socket 8 CPU socket was used exclusively with the Intel Pentium Pro and Pentium II Overdrive Computer processors The P6 Microarchitecture is the sixth generation Intel X86 Microprocessor architecture released in 1995. See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated The Pentium brand refers to Intel 's single-core x86 Microprocessor based on the P5 fifth-generation Microarchitecture. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3. 1 and 4. 5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5. In Electronics, a transistor is a Semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals 5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop chip. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. Socket 8 CPU socket was used exclusively with the Intel Pentium Pro and Pentium II Overdrive Computer processors
In 1997, the Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II processor, which was essentially a cost-reduced and re-branded Pentium Pro with the addition of MMX and enhanced 16-bit code performance. The Pentium II brand refers to Intel 's sixth-generation Microarchitecture (" Intel P6 " and x86 -compatible Microprocessors MMX is a single instruction multiple data (SIMD Instruction set designed by Intel, introduced in 1997 in their Pentium line of Costs were reduced by using standard SRAM cache chips running at half-speed, which increased production yields. Static random access memory (SRAM is a type of Semiconductor memory where the word static indicates that unlike ''dynamic'' RAM (DRAM, it does not The next year, in 1998, Intel split the market into three segments: budget workstations and home users, higher-end workstations and power users, and multi-processor capable servers. Those segments were served by the Celeron, the Pentium II, and the Pentium II Xeon, respectively. The Celeron brand is a range of X86 CPUs from Intel targeted at budget/value Personal computers with the motto "delivering great quality The Pentium II brand refers to Intel 's sixth-generation Microarchitecture (" Intel P6 " and x86 -compatible Microprocessors The Xeon brand refers to many families of Intel 's x86 Multiprocessing CPUs – for dual-processor (DP and multi-processor (MP configuration
The Pentium Pro (given the Intel product code 80521), was the first generation of the P6 architecture, which would carry Intel well into the next decade. The design would scale from its initial 150 MHz start, all the way up to 1. 4 GHz with the "Tualatin" Pentium III. Pentium III variants Katmai The first Pentium III variant was the Katmai (Intel product code 80525 The Pentium Pro had a theoretical performance of 400 MFLOPS. [1] The core's various traits would continue after that in the derivative core called "Banias" in Pentium M and Intel Core (Yonah), which itself would evolve into Core architecture (Core 2 processor) in 2006 and onward. Overview The Pentium M represented a new and radical departure for Intel as it was not a low-power version of the desktop-oriented Pentium 4, but instead a heavily modified The Core brand refers to Intel 's 32-bit mobile Dual-core X86 CPUs that derived from the Pentium M branded processors The Intel Core microarchitecture (previously known as the Intel Next-Generation Micro-Architecture, or NGMA is a multi-core processor 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
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Performance
Performance with 32-bit code was excellent and well ahead of the older Pentium at the time, by 25-35%; however, the Pentium Pro's 16-bit performance was approximately only 20% faster than a Pentium at running 16-bit code. The range of Integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4294967295 or −2147483648 through 2147483647 using Two's complement encoding It was this, along with the Pentium Pro's high price, due in part to the full speed L2 cache, that caused the rather lackluster reception for the chip among many home PC enthusiasts, given the dominance at the time of the 16-bit Windows 3.1x and MS-DOS. Windows 31x was a major release of Microsoft Windows. Several editions were released between 1992 and 1994 succeeding Windows 3 MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. Windows 95 had already been released at the time of the introduction of the Pentium Pro, but some parts of Windows 95 itself (for example, USER) were still mostly 16-bit. Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented Graphical user interface -based Operating system. To truly gain the full advantages of Pentium Pro's architecture, one was forced to run a fully 32-bit OS. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination Microsoft's only truly 32-bit OS at the time was Windows NT 3.51. Windows NT is a family of Operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993
Despite the name, the Pentium Pro was actually a completely new architecture, very different from Intel's earlier Pentium processor. The Pentium Pro (P6) core featured an array of advanced RISC technologies, although it wasn't the first x86 CPU with such approach -- before it, the NexGen Nx586 processor already utilized internal x86 translation to its own proprietary RISC86TM instruction set. The P6 Microarchitecture is the sixth generation Intel X86 Microprocessor architecture released in 1995. See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal NexGen (Milpitas CA was a private Semiconductor company that designed X86 PC Central processing units until it was purchased Perhaps the most obvious sign that things had changed was that the CPU's "front end" decoded the old IA32 instructions into micro-instructions which the Pro's RISC core then processed. IA-32 ( Intel Architecture 32-bit) often generically called X86 or x86-32, is the Instruction set architecture of Intel The core of Pentium Pro featured several technologies previously found mostly in RISC processors, including: speculative execution, superpipelining, register renaming, out of order execution, and a wider 36-bit address bus (usable by PAE). In Computer science, speculative execution is the execution of code, the result of which may not be needed Pipelining redirects here For HTTP pipelining see HTTP pipelining. In Computer engineering, register renaming refers to a technique usedto avoid unnecessary serialization of program operations imposed by the reuseof registers by those In Computer engineering, out-of-order execution, OoOE, is a paradigm used in most high-performance Microprocessors to make use of cycles that An address bus is a Computer bus, controlled by CPUs or DMA -capable Peripherals for specifying the Physical addresses of computer In Computing, Physical Address Extension ( PAE) refers to a feature of X86 and X86-64 processors that allows more than 4 Gigabytes (
After the microprocessor was released a bug was discovered in the floating point unit, commonly called the "Pentium Pro and Pentium II FPU bug" and by Intel as the "flag erratum". A floating point unit (FPU is a part of a Computer system specially designed to carry out operations on Floating point numbers The bug occurs under some circumstances during floating-point to integer conversion when the floating-point number won't fit into the smaller integer format causing the FPU to deviate from its documented behaviour. The bug is considered to be minor and occurs under such special circumstances that very few, if any, software programs are affected.
An innovation in cache
Likely Pentium Pro's most noticeable addition was its on-package L2 cache, which ranged from 256 KB at introduction to 1 MB in 1997. At the time, manufacturing technology did not feasibly allow a large L2 cache to be integrated into the processor core. Intel instead placed the L2 die(s) separately in the package which still allowed it to run at the same clock speed as the CPU core. Additionally, unlike most motherboard-based cache schemes that shared the main system bus with the CPU, the Pentium Pro's cache had its own backside bus (called dual independent bus by Intel). In Personal computer Microprocessor architecture a back side bus ( BSB) or backside bus, is a Computer bus used to connect the Because of this, the CPU could read main memory and cache concurrently, greatly reducing a traditional bottleneck. The cache was also "non-blocking", meaning that the processor could issue more than one cache request at a time (up to 4), reducing cache-miss penalties. (This is an example of MLP, Memory Level Parallelism. Memory Level Parallelism or MLP is a term in computer architecture referring to the ability to have pending multiple memory operations in particular Cache misses at the same ) These properties combined to produce an L2 cache that was immensely faster than the motherboard-based caches of older processors. This cache alone gave the CPU an advantage in input/output performance over older x86 CPUs. See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal In multiprocessor configurations, Pentium Pro's integrated cache skyrocketed performance in comparison to architectures which had each CPU sharing a central cache.
However, this far faster L2 cache did come with some complications. The Pentium Pro's "on-package cache" arrangement was unique. The processor and the cache were on separate dies in the same package and connected closely by a full-speed bus. The two or three dies had to be bonded together early in the production process, before testing was possible. This meant that a single, tiny flaw in either die made it necessary to discard the entire assembly, which was one of the reasons for the Pentium Pro's relatively low production yield and high cost. All versions of the chip were expensive, those with 1024 KB being particularly so, since it required two 512 KB cache dies as well as the processor die.
Available models
Pentium Pro clock speeds were 150, 166, 180 or 200 MHz with a 60 or 66 MHz external bus clock. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. In Personal computers the Front Side Bus ( FSB) is the bus that carries data between the CPU and the northbridge. Some users chose to overclock their Pentium Pro chips, with the 200 MHz version often being run at 233 MHz, and the 150 MHz version often being run at 166 MHz. The chip was popular in symmetric multiprocessing configurations, with dual and quad SMP server and workstation setups being commonplace. In Computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a Multiprocessor computer-architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single
In Intel's "Family/Model/Stepping" scheme, the Pentium Pro is family 6, model 1, and its Intel Product code is 80521.
Evolution in fabrication
As time progressed, the process used to fab the Pentium Pro changed, leading to a combination of processes used in the same package:
- The 150 MHz Pentium Pro processor die used a 0. 50 μm BiCMOS process. In Integrated circuit technologies BiCMOS, also called BiMOS, refers to the integration of Bipolar junction transistors and CMOS technology into
- The 166, 180, and 200 MHz Pentium Pro processor die used a 0. 35 μm CMOS process. Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor ( CMOS) (pronounced "see-moss" siːmɔːs ˈsiːmɒs is a major class of Integrated circuits CMOS technology
- The 256 KB L2 cache die used a 0. 50 μm BiCMOS process.
- The 512 and 1024 KB L2 cache die used a 0. 35 μm CMOS process.
Upgrade paths
In 1998, the 300/333 MHz Pentium II Overdrive processor for Socket 8 was released. The Pentium OverDrive was a Microprocessor marketing brand name used by Intel, to cover a variety of consumer upgrade products sold in the mid 1990s It Featuring 512 KB of full-speed cache, it was produced by Intel as a drop-in upgrade option for owners of Pentium Pro systems (the BIOS of the motherboard sometimes had to be updated). However, reflecting its Pentium II heritage, it only supported single or dual-processor operation, which did not make it a usable upgrade for high end quad-processor systems.
As Slot 1 motherboards became prevalent, several manufacturers released slockets, such as the Tyan M2020, Asus C-P6S1, Tekram P6SL1 and the Abit KP6, to allow Pentium Pro processors to be used in them. In Computer hardware terminology slotkets, also known as slockets, (both short for slot to socket adapter) are adapters that allow socket-based The Intel 440FX chipset explicitly supports both Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors so using a slocket with them is straightforward. This is a list of Computer Motherboard Chipsets made by Intel. However, since the Intel 440BX and later Slot 1 chipsets do not explicitly support the Pentium Pro, the only Socket 8 processor that will usually work with a slocket in such a motherboard is the Pentium II Overdrive, since it is in essence a Pentium II processor. The Intel 440BX, also known as the i440BX is a Chipset from Intel, supporting Pentium II, Pentium III, and Celeron processors
Core specifications
Pentium Pro
- L1 cache: 8 + 8 KB (Data + Instructions)
- L2 cache: 256, 512 KB (one die) or 1024 KB (two 512 KB dies) in a multi-chip module clocked at CPU-speed
- Socket: Socket 8
- Front side bus: 60 and 66 MHz
- VCore: 3. A Multi-Chip Module (MCM is a specialized electronic package where multiple Integrated circuits (ICs semiconductor dies or other modules are packaged in such a way as Socket 8 CPU socket was used exclusively with the Intel Pentium Pro and Pentium II Overdrive Computer processors In Personal computers the Front Side Bus ( FSB) is the bus that carries data between the CPU and the northbridge. 1-3. 3 V
- Fabrication: 0. 50 µm BiCMOS and/or 0. In Integrated circuit technologies BiCMOS, also called BiMOS, refers to the integration of Bipolar junction transistors and CMOS technology into 35 µm CMOS[1]
- First release: November 1995
- Clockrate: 150, 166, 180, 200 MHz
Pentium II Overdrive
- L1 cache: 16 + 16 KB (Data + Instructions)
- L2 cache: 512 KB external chip on CPU module running at 100% of CPU speed
- Socket: Socket 8
- Multiplier: Locked at 5x
- Front side bus: 60 and 66 MHz
- VCore: 3. Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor ( CMOS) (pronounced "see-moss" siːmɔːs ˈsiːmɒs is a major class of Integrated circuits CMOS technology Socket 8 CPU socket was used exclusively with the Intel Pentium Pro and Pentium II Overdrive Computer processors In Personal computers the Front Side Bus ( FSB) is the bus that carries data between the CPU and the northbridge. 1-3. 3 V (Has on-board voltage regulator)
- Fabrication: 0. 25 µm
- Based on the Deschutes-generation Pentium II
- First release: 1997
- Supports MMX technology
Pentium Pro / 6th generation competitors
- AMD K5 and K6
- Cyrix 6x86 and MII
- IDT WinChip
- Intel Pentium (co-existed with Pentium Pro for several years)
References
See also
External links
- Backside Bus at Whatis. The Pentium II brand refers to Intel 's sixth-generation Microarchitecture (" Intel P6 " and x86 -compatible Microprocessors MMX is a single instruction multiple data (SIMD Instruction set designed by Intel, introduced in 1997 in their Pentium line of The K5 was AMD's first x86 processor developed entirely in-house introduced in March 1996 The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997 The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for The Cyrix 6x86 (codename M1 is a sixth-generation 32-bit 80x86 -compatible Microprocessor designed by Cyrix and manufactured by IBM The Cyrix 6x86 (codename M1 is a sixth-generation 32-bit 80x86 -compatible Microprocessor designed by Cyrix and manufactured by IBM The WinChip series was a low-power Socket 7 -based X86 processor designed by Centaur Technology and marketed by its parent company The Pentium brand refers to Intel 's single-core x86 Microprocessor based on the P5 fifth-generation Microarchitecture. The Pentium Pro from Intel is the first of their sixth-generation CPUs targeted at the consumer and server markets The Pentium II from Intel is a sixth-generation CPU targeted at the consumer market com
- Intel Pentium Pro images and descriptions at cpu-collection.de
- CPU-INFO: Intel Pentium Pro, indepth processor history
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