Intel Pentium II
The Intel Pentium II is the successor to the Pentium and Pentium Pro. It was released in 1997 and essentially adds the MMX instruction set to the Pentium Pro's P6 as well as a few other improvements.
They were firstly available as 233 and 267 MHz parts, then parts up to 450 MHz were released. The Pentium IIs were packaged in the form of cartridges, which were normally inserted in the Slot 1. The era also marked the appearance of the low cost Celerons and the server oriented Xeons, the latter being inserted in the Slot 2 for this generation. Pentium II based Celerons were later proposed as usual socketed processors on Socket 370.
On Desktop, there were two notable variants. The Pentium II was first released with the Klamath Core (80522), manufactured with a 350 nm process. Then, Deschutes Pentium IIs (80523) were released in early 1998 and made with a 250 nm process.
A Socket 8 Pentium II OverDrive was also produced to upgrade Pentium Pros in the same fashion as the Socket 2/3 Pentium OverDrive allowed to upgrade a 486.
A Keychain with a Pentium II Die.
The Pentium II is suceeded by the Pentium III in 1999.
Operating System Support
- A Pentium II will by itself not prevent any x86 Windows until 7 from running. Windows Vista and 7 officially require a 800 and 1 GHz CPU, but can actually work on a Pentium II regardless of the frequency. They however require the motherboard to have some ACPI compilance, and some early Slot 1 Motherboards might not support it.
- Aero will work properly with a supported graphics card.
- Some later Windows 7 updates will break support since they require SSE2.
- We are not aware of any Windows 8 and later running on a Slot 1.
- The Pentium II is still supported by the Linux Kernel, and Linux Distributions still supporting x86 should work on this CPU.
- Aero on Vista can work on Pentium II, here with a Radeon 9500. A Deschutes 400 MHz SL357 running at 533 MHz was used - CPU-Z Validation. For some reason, the Wei Test skips the Aero Test, giving it the infamous 1.0 Score for both Graphics sections (which should only happen if Aero cannot run at all), and consequently 1.0 for the Base Score... Interestingly, the same configuration with a GeForce 6200 produces a Blue Screen at Boot, but worked well with a Pentium III.
- For some reason, Aero will not work with an Early Klamath 233 at 292 (CPU-Z shows 5.5x multiplier for some reason while it is really 2x146!), but will on Windows 7, and also with a GeForce 6200! So Vista's Drivers or Aero Implementation is more picky on the Processor for some reason... Well, not like the enhancement would ever have affected anyone in production use! The Wei Test would unfortunately time out with supported Graphics, also with the Pentium II @533... Without Drivers, it could run, and actually score less than 1.0 for the CPU!
The experiment was conducted on an Asus P3V4X.