Marketing description

Consider upgrading your Compaq system with this ultra-fast processor option. The Pentium II Processor is designed for high-performance desktops, workstations, and servers. The processors in this family are the next logical step up after the Pentium Pro processors, and are to be used for demanding 16-bit and 32-bit applications running under Windows 95, Windows NT, and UNIX. They combine the processing power of the Pentium Pro processors with MMX Technology at higher clock speeds with 512KB of In-Package L2 cache.
With Pentium II processor you'll not only get a boost in processing speed but you'll also enjoy increased system bus bandwidth. This processor is designed for a 100MHz system bus, allowing you to take full advantage of Pentium II power by feeding more information to the processor. The 100MHz system bus combined with the Pentium II's own Dual Independent Bus architecture will give all of your applications more room to breathe than they've ever had.

Key selling points

• Dynamic Execution technology
• Super pipelining
• Dual Independent Bus (DIB) architecture
• High performance Intel MMX technology
• Write combining

Product features

• Dynamic Execution technology
  Dynamic execution incorporates the concepts of out-of-order and speculative execution. The Pentium II processor's implementation of these concepts removes the constraint of linear instruction sequencing between the traditional fetch and execute phases of instruction execution. Up to 3 instructions can be decoded per clock cycle. These decoded instructions are put into a buffer, which can hold up to 40 instructions.
• Super pipelining
  The pipeline of the P6 processor family consists of approximately 12 stages, versus 5 for the Pentium processor and 6 for the Pentium processor with MMX technology. This enables the Pentium II processor to achieve about a 50% higher frequency than the Pentium processor on the same manufacturing technology. The sophisticated, two-level, adaptive training, and branch prediction mechanism of the Pentium II processor is key to maintaining the efficiency of the super pipelined micro architecture.
• Dual Independent Bus (DIB) architecture
  This architecture consists of two distinct buses emanating from the Pentium II processor: the L2 cache bus and the system bus (used for memory and I/O requests). The L2 cache bus speed scales with processor frequency. Unlike the Pentium processor's system bus, the Pentium II processor's system bus supports up to 8 outstanding bus requests (4 per processor). This allows more parallelism between processors and I/O, as well as supporting smooth performance scaling to a 2 processor system. The GTL+ electrical signaling of the system bus facilitates the migration of this bus to higher frequencies as higher performance DRAM technologies come to market.
• High performance Intel MMX technology
  Intel's MMX media enhancement technology is a major extension of the Intel Architecture that makes PCs into richer multimedia and communications platforms. This technology introduces 57 instructions oriented to highly parallel operations with multimedia and communications data types. These instructions use a technique known as SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) to deliver better performance for multimedia and communications computation.
• Write combining
  The Write Combining technology of the P6 architecture can be used to achieve very high graphics I/O performance. This feature combines multiple writes to a region of memory (for example, a video controller's frame buffer) declared as WC type into a single-burst write operation. This is well suited for the bus, which is optimized for burst transfers. The combining also leads to burst writes of cache line sizes. These writes are further combined by the chipset, leading to high throughput for graphics I/O.