Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Aside from speed, the best way to think of the Pentium II is as a Pentium Pro with MMX
technology instructions and a slightly modified cache design. It has the same multipro-
cessor scalability as the Pentium Pro, as well as the integrated L2 cache. The 57 new
multimedia-related instructions carried over from the MMX processors and the capability
to process repetitive loop commands more efficiently are included as well. Also included
asapartoftheMMXupgradeisdoubletheinternalL1cachefromthePentiumPro(from
16KB total to 32KB total in the Pentium II).
For more information about the Pentium II, see Chapter 3 of Upgrading and Repairing
PCs, 19 th edition , available in its entirety on the disc packaged with this topic.
Pentium III
The Pentium III processor, shown in Figure 3.26 , was released in February 1999 and in-
troducedseveralnewfeaturestotheP6family.ItisessentiallythesamecoreasaPentium
II with the addition of SSE instructions and integrated on-die L2 cache in the later ver-
sions. SSE consists of 70 new instructions that dramatically enhance the performance and
possibilitiesofadvancedimaging,3D,streamingaudio,video,andspeech-recognitionap-
plications.
Figure 3.26 Pentium III processor in SECC2 (Slot 1) and FC-PGA (Socket 370) packages.
 
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