FiringSquad reviews Intel Core Duo E6700 (2.66ghz) and Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93ghz) processors
In November, 1995 Intel first introduced the world to its first P6 processor, the Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro was Intel's first processor to boast support for speculative execution. This refers to the processor's ability to look at instructions ahead in the program and determine which instructions are dependent on each other. It then executed the instructions in the most efficient way possible while retiring them in the order they were originally written. Another feature of the Pentium Pro was its superpipelined architecture -- work was split into 12 stages, versus the five stages used in the original Pentium processor. This allowed the Pentium Pro processor to scale to higher clock speeds even though it was still based on the same 0.35-micron manufacturing process.
Why are we devoting so much time to the Pentium Pro in an article on Intel's latest Core 2 processor you ask? Because the Pentium Pro's P6 microarchitecture eventually went on to become Intel's best-selling CPU, powering the guts behind the Pentium II and eventually the Pentium III, and in some ways you could definitely argue that some of the basic attributes found in today's Core 2 CPUs dates back to the good 'ol P6 Pentium Pro. Before we elaborate further on that though let's briefly discuss Core's predecessor, the Pentium 4/D...
[read more]
