The Intel Pentium Pro And Its Features.
The Intel Pentium Pro or P6 was introduced as a successor to Pentium and it introduced a variety of unique PC processor features. The performance of Pentium Pro (introduced in the year 1995) was around 50% faster than Pentium. It radically changed the execution of instructions by translating them into micro instructions and then executing them in highly advanced cores. It was the Nexgen Nx586 processor which actually had this design, but very few computers used it. The increased performance of the Intel Pentium Pro was also due to other features incorporated into it, some of which are:
* Super pipelining-The amount of execution steps was dramatically increased to 14 as compared to Pentium 5.
* 32-Bit Optimization-The Pentium Pro ruins 32 bit code increasing the performance of the processor.
* Address bus- the address bus was widened to 36 bits which allowed the processor to work on a 64 GB memory. * multiprocessing-while Pentium supported dual processor configurations, the Intel Pentium pro is able to support quad too. * Integrated Level 2 Cache- the Integrated Level 2 Cache enables the Pentium Pro to work on a processor speed which is almost triple the speed of a Pentium processor. * Branch Prediction Unit- the size of this unit is almost double the size of the Branch Prediction Unit of Pentium, increasing the accuracy of the processor. * The Intel Pentium Pro can complete instructions out of order (of execution pipelines) * Speculative Execution is used by the Intel Pentium Pro which reduces the stall time of pipelines. * The pipeline has parallel performance of is improved be the register renaming feature. The Intel Pentium Pro processor is a good choice for servers despite the fact that it is very old. The reasons are many. For example, the Intel Pentium Pro is a fast chip in comparison to many others. Multiprocessing is enabled by its Integrated Level 2 Cache (this feature is one of the most advanced features of the Intel Pentium Pro). It enables each processor to have an individual motherboard based cache which need not be shared by many processors. The Intel Pentium Pro packaging in a SPGA package (dual cavity), which includes the chip as well as the Integrated Level 2 Cache has a disadvantage that the whole processor would have to be replaced if you what to upgrade the cache. The company has announced that it has stopped the manufacture of the Intel Pentium Pro and that it would no longer provide software updates in order to support or improve compatibility with other operating systems, devices or software products. Another disadvantage of using the Intel Pentium Pro processor for the user is that Intel has also announced that the interactive product support for the Intel Pentium Pro over E-mail and phone is being discontinued. Thus, if the consumer wants to clarify his doubts, the only way to contact the Intel technical support would be through the web. Thus for any new consumer, the means of clarifying his doubts or getting technical support for his Intel Pentium Pro are severely reduced.
| 