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Pentium III Xeon
Launched in 1999The Intel Pentium III Xeon is the workstation and server variant of the Pentium III introduced in 1999, based on the P6 microarchitecture and therefore retaining dynamic out-of-order execution, register renaming, speculative execution, and micro-op translation while adding SSE support and targeting higher-end multiprocessor platforms. Unlike mainstream Pentium III models for Slot 1 or Socket 370, the Pentium III Xeon uses Slot 2 packaging to support larger external L2 cache configurations, with early Katmai-based versions built on a 0.25 µm process and offered with 512 KiB, 1 MiB, or 2 MiB of half-speed backside cache. Later Cascades versions moved to a 0.18 µm process while preserving Slot 2 and improving power efficiency and clock scaling, though they still relied on off-die L2 cache rather than the integrated cache approach used by Coppermine. Technically, the Pentium III Xeon is best understood as the final high-end Slot 2 implementation of the P6 family, optimized for cache-heavy workstation and server workloads rather than cost-sensitive desktop systems.