Pentium Pro


Pentium Pro

(processor)(Known as "P6" during development) Intel'ssuccessor to the Pentium processor, in development Jan 1995,generally available 1995-11-01. The P6 has an internalRISC architecture with a CISC-RISC translator, 3-waysuperscalar execution, and out-of order execution (or"speculative execution", which Intel calls "Dynamic Execution"). It also features branch prediction andregister renaming, and is superpipelined (14 stages).

The P6 is made as a two-chip assembly: the first chip is theCPU and 16 kilobyte first-level cache (5.5 milliontransistors) and the other is a 256 (or 512) kilobytesecond-level cache (15 million transistors). The firstversion has a clock rate of 133 Mhz and consumes about 20Wof power. It is about twice as fast as the 100 MHz Pentium.The original 0.35 micron versions of the Pentium Pro releasedon 1995-11-01 run at 150 and 166 Mhz for desktop machines andup to 200 Mhz for servers. Heat disspation is about 20Watts.

The Pentium Pro is optimised for 32-bit software and runs16-bit software slower than the original Pentium. Thesuccessor was the Pentium II.

Pentium Pro

The sixth generation of the Intel x86 family of CPU chips. The term may refer to the chip or to a PC that uses it. Introduced in 1995 as the successor to the Pentium, models from 150 MHz to 200 MHz were released. Using the first generation of Intel's Extended Server Memory Architecture, Pentium Pro CPUs address 64GB of memory rather than 4GB. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II. See Pentium.