Why would a pentium II show up as a pentium PRO sometimes?

[Maximilian]

Why did this happen? A post in the fav CPU of all time thread got me thinking about this, i used to have a PII 333mhz and i remember it starting up sometimes it would say pentium PRO. I had no idea what a pentium PRO was at the time so didn't take any notice.

So what would cause this to happen every now and then? I never even entered the BIOS of that computer to mess around.

 

[ElFenix]

because the pentium 2 is little else than a pentium pro with the cache moved out of the package and onto the daughter board.

oh they fixed some 16 bit stuff. didn't matter to those of us who ran NT.

 

[Tsavo]

P2-3's were based upon the PPRo, so that's the source of whatever fritz is going on.

 

[Arkaign]

Yep. As a matter of fact the very early 66fsb mobos for P2 slot 1 used the FX chipset, which was almost identical in both Slot 1 and Socket 8 scenarios IIRC.

 

[Maximilian]

Yeah they're both based on P6 but why would it show pentium PRO 333 sometimes and pentium II 333 others? There probably isnt some sort of randomizer built into the board that decides "today im going to be... pentium PRO!" or whatever.

From when i took it apart a few years ago it had some ULI chipset, it wasent a BX so im assuming it was the FX one. AT form factor with a lot of weird wires going places they don't do in modern cases, power supply directly wired to the on/off button somehow.

 

[ElFenix]

Yeah they're both based on P6 but why would it show pentium PRO 333 sometimes and pentium II 333 others? There probably isnt some sort of randomizer built into the board that decides "today im going to be... pentium PRO!" or whatever.

the software is reading a family/model/stepping code and looking that up in the table. should be the same as long as you're using the same version of the same software.

From when i took it apart a few years ago it had some ULI chipset, it wasent a BX so im assuming it was the FX one. AT form factor with a lot of weird wires going places they don't do in modern cases, power supply directly wired to the on/off button somehow.

if it's a ULI chipset it is not a BX or an FX. BX and FX (and LX) were intel chipets. ULI is a different company, which was bought out by nvidia iirc.

 

[opethfan]

If the application wasn't aware of the P2's existence, but saw the similarities to the PPro, it would default to that, I presume.

Like how C&C 95 will moan at me for running windows 5.1 on XP.

 

[blackphoenix]

Speaking of the good ole P2s, anyone remember why they went with the slot 1 design only to go back to sockets?

 

[ElFenix]

Speaking of the good ole P2s, anyone remember why they went with the slot 1 design only to go back to sockets?

they needed a daughter card to put the sram cache chip on. the pentium pro had two chips in the package, the processor core and the L2 sram. back then the only way they could test the chips was to assemble the package and then test. if either the sram or the processor was bad, the whole thing had to be tossed. that was expensive. by moving the sram to a daughter card the components could be tested individually.

they moved back to sockets because manufacturing caught up to design and the cache could be put on chip more cheaply than making a daughter card.

 

[jmarti445]

The Pentium pro was essentially a Pentium 2. The only difference I believe between the pentium pro and the pentium 2 architecturely was the Pentium 2 was optimized for 16-bit instructions and had MMX as well.