Intel Pentium II Xeon

Historia

The Pentium II Xeon was introduced in June 1998 as Intels new line of server and workstation processors. The PII Xeon core, manufactured in a .25 micron process, is not much different from the Pentium IIs core. It added multiprocessing support for quad CPU systems and even 8 CPUs in one system and a few enhancements, such as support for more than 4GB of memory. The biggest difference in both performance and architecture comes from the PII Xeon’s L2-cache, at 512KB, 1 or even 2 MB and running at full clockspeed, while the Pentium II was only offered with a 512KB L2 cache running at half CPU clockspeed. The PII Xeon also introduced Intels biggest processor module so far (about twice the size of a Pentium II cartridge) to include the CPU core and up to four 512KB L2 cache chips.