A Tour Of The Pentium Pro Processor Microarchitecture

Part I of Essay
Introduction One of the Pentium Pro processor's primary goals was to significantly exceed the performance of the 100MHz Pentium processor while being manufactured on the same semiconductor process. Using the same process as a volume production processor practically assured ....

Part II of Essay
.... pipelined implementation uses five stages to extract high throughput from the silicon - the Pentium Pro processor moves to a decoupled, 12-stage, superpipelined implementation, trading less work per pipestage for more stages. The Pentium Pro processor reduced its pipestage time by 33 percent, compared with a Pentium processor, which means the Pentium Pro processor can have a 33% higher clock speed than a Pentium processor and still be equally easy to produce from a semiconductor manufacturing process (i.e., transistor speed) perspective. ....