Pentium II

processor Intel Corporation's successor to the PentiumPro.

The Pentium II can execute all the instructions of all the

earlier members of the Intel 80x86 processor family. There

are four versions targetted at different user markets. The

Celeron is the simplest and cheapest. The standard Pentium

II is aimed at mainstream home and business users. The

Pentium II Xeon is intended for higher performance business

servers. There is also a mobile version of the Pentium II

for use in portable computers.

All versions of the Pentium II are packaged on a special

daughterboard that plugs into a card-edge processor slot on

the motherboard. The daughterboard is enclosed within a

rectangular black box called a Single Edge Contact (SEC)

cartridge. The budget Celeron may be sold as a card only

without the box. Consumer line Pentium II's require a 242-pin

slot called Slot 1. The Xeon uses a 330-pin slot called

Slot 2. Intel refers to Slot 1 and Slot 2 as SEC-242 and

SEC-330 in some of their technical documentation. The

daughterboard has mounting points for the Pentium II CPU

itself plus various support chips and cache memory chips.

All components on the daughterboard are normally permanently

soldered in place. Previous generation Socket 7

motherboards cannot normally be upgraded to accept the Pentium

II, so it is necessary to install a new motherboard.

All Pentium II processors have Multimedia Extensions (MMX)

and integrated Level One and Level Two cache controllers.

Additional features include Dynamic Execution and Dual

Independent Bus Architecture, with separate 64 bit system and

cache busses. Pentium II is a superscalar CPU having about

7.5 million transistors.

The first Pentium II's produced were code named Klamath.

They were manufactured using a 0.35 micron process and

supported clock rates of 233, 266, 300 and 333 MHz at a

bus speed of 66 MHz. Second generation Pentium II's, code

named Deschutes, are made with a 0.25 micron process and

support rates of 350, 400 and 450 MHz at a bus speed of 100

MHz.

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(1998-10-06)