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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

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Jan 14 3:59 PM EST

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To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (58710)	6/24/1998 9:40:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) of 186894

Bill - Re: "Why do we see Pentium and Pentium II's in the stores when there is a generation missing? It seems as if the Pentium Pro fell off the face of the earth" The Pentium Pro was designed in such a way that it exhibits excellent performance on 32 bit applications - running under 32 bit operating systems. Intel failed to take into account that the original P6 (Pentium Pro) architecture would incur certain performance penalties when executing 16 bit code and operating systems. The core of the problem was due to the way Intel implemented segment register contents in the original Pentium Pro. A further problem was that Intel chose to package the Pentium Pro in a dual-cavity PGA package with a tightly coupled L2 cache SRAM device packaged into the second cavity. This cache chip was expensive since it had to run at the speed of the processor - 200 MHz - and in 1995, only Intel made this (the SRAM also had to have Intel's GTL+ electrical interface.) The expensive dual cavity ceramic PGA package, coupled with the YIELD HIT if either the SRAM or the Pentium Pro chip was bad after packaging - both chips AND the ceramic package would have to be scrapped - resulted in an expensive proposition that lent itself to two market segments that were willing to pay for the added costs - Workstations and Servers. The Pentium Pro has done extremely well in these applications (Workstations and Servers) which use 32 bit OSes - Windows NT, UNIX, Solaris, etc. Also, these market segments will pay for the Pentium Pro's higher costs. As for the mainstream, the Pentium II has the Pentium Pro as its basic core architecture with some improvements and enhancements. The segment register issue was "fixed" by adding segment register caches to the chip to help it switch from one 64 bit segment to another without an enormous time penalty to load the appropriate segment register value. Intel also added the MMX instructions and doubled up the on-chip L1 cache (to 32 KiliyBytes). Intel further reduced the cost by ditching the expensive dual cavity ceramic PGA AND the custom SRAM chips and went to a cheap BGA package, an SEC daughter card and standard L2 SRAM chips that ran at HALF processor speed available from commercial SRAM suppliers. This of course was, and is, the Pentium II. Paul

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