Pentium Pro

processor (Known as "P6" during development) Intel's

successor to the Pentium processor, in development Jan 1995,

generally available 1995-11-01. The P6 has an internal

RISC architecture with a CISC-RISC translator, 3-way

superscalar execution, and out-of order execution (or

"speculative execution", which Intel calls "DynamicExecution"). It also features branch prediction and

register renaming, and is superpipelined (14 stages).

The P6 is made as a two-chip assembly: the first chip is the

CPU and 16 kilobyte first-level cache (5.5 million

transistors) and the other is a 256 (or 512) kilobyte

second-level cache (15 million transistors). The first

version has a clock frequency of 133 Mhz and consumes about

20W of power. It is about twice as fast as the 100 MHz

Pentium. The original 0.35 micron versions of the Pentium Pro

released on 1995-11-01 run at 150 and 166 Mhz for desktop

machines and up to 200 Mhz for servers. Heat disspation is

about 20 Watts.

The Pentium Pro is optimised for 32-bit software and runs

16-bit software slower than the original Pentium. The

successor was the Pentium II.

[Performance?]

(1996-03-01)