You are correct... The P-II/P-III/Celeron/Xeon are all based on the Pentium
Pro. There have been changes like MMX and Katmai as well as the process
shrinking from .35 micron for the P-Pro to .25 for the P-II/P-II/Celeron and
then .18 micron for the new Coppermine P-III processors.
There have also been cache changes.. The P-Pro had cache on the die that ran
at the speed of the CPU and came in 256k, 512k, and 1 meg varieties.
The P-II and early P-III had 512k of 1/2 speed cache on the slot card. The
first celerons had no L2 cache at all.. The second gen Celerons have 128k of
full speed cache on the chip die. The Coppermine chips have 256k of full
speed cache on the chip also..
I believe some of the instruction pipelining for the FPU has been improved
over the last 5 years as well..
However, the main instruction set for the CPU remains unchanged since the
P-Pro came out in late 1995.
Intel's 7th generation processor is supposed to be released 4th quarter
2000. It has been code named Merced for the last 4 years or so.. The actual
product name "Itanium" was recently announced. It will be a true 64 bit
processor and completely incompatible with all x86 code, unless someone
decides to create an emulator for it.
----- Original Message -----
From: Matt Stegman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, November 08, 1999 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: [newbie] Choose Pentium? OR 586?
> On 5 Nov, John Aldrich wrote:
> > On Fri, 05 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> In menuconfig, (I have a feeling this is a dumb question) I
> >> automatically have 386 with an "X" next to it. I have a Pentium 233
> >> mHz. Is that technically a 586? I'm not sure whether to tell it that
> >> or Pentium. My Linux book says to check 586 but I'm not sure why.
> >>
> > Yes! A Pentium is a 586-class processor. I think Technically a
> > Pentium is a 586, a Pentium Pro is a 686, a PII would be a 786, and a
> > PIII would be an 886
>
> Not quite. P-II and P-III are both 686 processors. The first (or so I
> hear) truly 7th generation x86 processor on the market is AMD's Athlon
> processor. The P-III is just a hyped up P-II, which is just a P-Pro
> with MMX. Of course, I'm over-simplfying, but I believe I'm mostly
> correct. I do know for sure that neither the P-II nor P-III qualify as
> anything more than a "686" processor.
>
> --
> -Matt Stegman
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
