XEON

10/17/98

Xeon: Intel's top of the line Pentium CPU in the Summer of 1998. It was introduced at 400MHz in June of 1998 and is expected to be or has been released at 450MHz as well. Although based on the Pentium Pro, The Xeon looks much like a Pentium II with 512 or 1MB of L2 cache with only 512K available for the 450MHz unit. The L2 cache runs at full CPU clock speed -- twice as fast as the Pentium II. The Xeon is specified as using a 100MHz external bus speed vs 66MHz for the Pentium II-400 and has a 64GB physical address range vs 4GB for the Pentium II-400. Packaging is a 330 pin Slot 2 SEC package that differs from the Slot I package used by the P-II.

Power dissipation for the 400MHz, 512K cache Xeon is 31 watts, for 400/1MHz = 38watts, 450MHz, 512K is 34 watts

Like the Pentium II and unlike the Pentium Pro, the Xeon, supports MMX.

The Xeon is advertised as having built in multiprocessing support for two or four processors.

Intel does not seem to have published an icomp rating for the Xeon. Single user tests including Autocad type benchmarks show little or no performance difference between the Xeon-450 and the ordinary PII-450. Other testing shows a difference of as much as 10% in the Xeon's favor.