Pentium II

Pentium II processor with MMX technology, SECC cartridge The Pentium II is a brand of sixth-generation Intel x86 microprocessors based on the P6 microarchitecture, introduced on May 7, 1997. It combined the P6 microarchitecture seen on the Pentium Pro with the MMX instruction set of the Pentium MMX, and is the second processor using the Pentium brand.

Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB on-die L2 cache), the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to the Pentium Pro's. In 1998, Intel stratified the Pentium II family through the release of the Pentium II-based Celeron line of processors for low-end computers and the Intel Pentium II Xeon line for servers and workstations. The Celeron was characterized by a reduced or omitted (in some cases present but disabled) on-die full-speed L2 cache and a 66 MT/s FSB. The Xeon was characterized by a range of full-speed L2 cache (from 512 KB to 2048 KB), a 100 MT/s FSB, a different physical interface (Slot 2), and support for symmetric multiprocessing.