Intel Pentium III Xeon

Historia

The Pentium III Xeon was introduced in March 1999. Early versions (Code named Tanner) where built in .25 micron technology and featured a 100MHz front side bus, 512KB to 2MB L2 off-die cache sizes and multiprocessor support for up to 8 CPUs. In October 1999 Intel introduced the 2nd generation PIII Xeon Cascades, using the same core as the .18 micron Pentium III Coppermine processor. As a result the Cascades has its 256KB on-die L2 cache running at full clock speed and all the other Coppermine features like Advanced Transfer Cache, Advanced System Buffering, support for 133 MHz front speed bus, SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions), etc. However, the introduction of Cascades had some severe drawbacks: The small 256KB L2 cache took back the Xeons performance advance over the standard Pentium III and the 133MHz bus protocol did not support more than 2 CPUs in a system. In May 2000 Intel finally released a large cache version with up to 2MB (on-die) L2 cache and 100MHz front side bus, again supporting multiprocessing with up to 8 CPUs.