Intel Corp duly luanched its much previewed Pentium II chip in Europe yesterday, a day before the official US launch. As expected, the MMX multimedia-enabled Pentium II comes in three speeds, 233MHz, 266MHz and 300MHz, the first two available immediately in a dozen or more deskop systems, with the 300MHz version expected to appear first in workstations sonetime during the third quarter. The Pentium II includes the dual independent bus already used in the Pentium Pro (CI No 3,137), offering three times the processor-to-memory-bus bandwidth of single-bus, socket-7 processors such as the Pentium. The level 2 cache bus, separated from the processor-to-main memory bus, scales with the clock-speed of the processor, so that on the 300MHz version the L2 bus runs at 150MHz, compared with the 66MHz version used on the Pentium. The L2 cache itself is made up of industry-sourced Burst SRAMs, which helps keep the price down. New on the Pentium II is the Single Edge Contact Cartridge, a new packaging technology that replaces the older Pin Grid Array technology. Using the SEC cartridge, components are mounted on a substrate and enclosed in a plastic and metal cartridge, forming the processor. Intel claims that SEC and the associated Slot 1 infrastructure will give it the headroom it needs for future performance upgrades. The core Pentium II processor, based on the P6 architecture, has 7.5m transistors and is manufactured in .35 micron process technology. Exact pricing, slightly higher than we anticipated yesterday, is $636 for the 233MHz part and $775 for the 266MHz part, both with 512KB L2 cache and in quantities of 1,000. The 300MHz part, once available, will be priced at $1,981 in 1,000 unit quantities. Pentium II motherboards are also available. Performance-wise, the Pentium II has a SPECint95 rating of 11.6 and SPECfp95 rating of 7.20 in its fastest, 300MHz guise. Despite increased competition from the likes of Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Cyrix Corp, Intel claims it still has the performance edge if you take its three vectors of microprocessor performance – integer, floating point and multimedia – into account.
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