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Pentium II Xeon
Launched in 1998The Intel Pentium II Xeon is a high-end server and workstation derivative of the Pentium II introduced in 1998, based on the same P6 microarchitecture and therefore retaining dynamic out-of-order execution, register renaming, speculative execution, and micro-op translation while targeting platforms requiring larger caches, higher multiprocessing scalability, and more robust system interfaces. Unlike standard Pentium II processors for Slot 1, the Pentium II Xeon uses the much larger Slot 2 connector and cartridge packaging designed to accommodate substantially more external L2 cache, with cache capacities ranging from 512 KiB to 2 MiB and typically operating at half core frequency on a dedicated backside bus. Early Pentium II Xeon models were based on the 0.35 µm Drake core, followed by the 0.25 µm Tanner shrink, both preserving full IA-32 compatibility, MMX support, and strong 32-bit performance inherited from the P6 design. Technically, the Pentium II Xeon is best understood as the server-class branch of the Pentium II family, optimized less for consumer cost efficiency than for cache-intensive workloads, multi-socket operation, and high-end enterprise platforms.