Tony, re: P6/PII - Let's get it right.
Not good to respond in a factual manner with bad info. This is the real meal:
The facts:
- P6 was the chip project name* for the chip that was marketed as Pentium Pro. The PPro has two chips in a single ceramic package. One chip is the P6; the second is an Intel-made, special 256KB SRAM L2 cache chip.
- The original P6 has been shrunk and cost-reduced several times since with only minor changes in functionality.
- Intel is now calling the family of chips collectively "The P6 architecture". Since the P6 chip was the original name it now is serving as a moniker for the whole set of products based on its original functionality.
- The first shrink had the chip project name of Klamath. The Klamath chip was placed in a cartridge with four standard SRAM chips and one cache tag chip (Total of 512KB L2 cache). This product has the marketing name Pentium II.
- The second shrink has the chip project name of Deshutes.
- Deshutes chip can substitute for Klamath. Intel markets this under the Pentium II name, just as the faster speed grades of 333, 350, and 400, the latter two introduced today. This flavor has only two SRAM chips plus the cache tag chip for the 512KB L2 cache.
- The original cartridge was stripped and built without the L2 cache components for lower cost. This has the marketing name Celeron.
- Another chip project is named Mendicino, will add 256K L2 cache to the processor chip. The product is monolithic, meaning that everything is on one chip. Plans are to placed it into the same cartridge and give a marketing name consistent with Celeron. Who knows, perhaps it will be called Celeron II or some such.
* Chip project names are informal monikers intended for private internal use only simply because a company needs a label long before the marketing group chooses the formal name. Project names are coined casually without regard to conflicts. Intel doesn't care if other companies use these same names since they are not intended to become known outside the company and do not represent any Intel products for sale.
Marketing names are chosen carefully with extensive searches for trademark and copyright conflicts. Intel does not want these names to conflict with any other commercial names and in turn does not want anyone else to call their imitation products with the same name.
Little know facts - Intel has suffered increasing grief as others have learned and used their internal names publicly. These often conflict with other trademarks. For instance the chip set project name "Triton" became such an issue. Well somebody in Intel's legal department got the belief that Intel could not be sued for incidental conflicts if it chose project names used by geographical entities, namely rivers, national parks, and towns. Processor projects went with rivers of Oregon and California. The desktop chipsets went with town names of central California and server chipsets went with Western mountain peaks. Please regard this guide cautiously as their is no purity here. They are just project names after all and will not be consistent to these categories...
Jeff |
