Microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro Processor

Introduction One of the Pentium® Pro processor's primary goals was to significantly exceed the performance of the 100MHz Pentium® processor while being manufactured on the same semiconductor process. Using the same process as a volume production processor practically assured that the Pentium Pro processor would be manufacturable, but it meant that Intel had to focus on an improved microarchitecture for ALL of the performance gains. This guided tour describes how multiple architectural techniques - some …

…in impact as 'Superscalar' was to previous generation Intel Architecture processors. While all your PC applications run on the Pentium Pro processor, today's powerful 32-bit applications take best advantage of Pentium Pro processor performance. And while our architects were honing the Pentium Pro processor microarchitecture, our silicon technologists were working on an advanced manufacturing process - the 0.35 micron process. The result is that the initial Pentium Pro Processor CPU core speeds range up to 200MHz.