Pentium II

The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture ("Intel P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors, the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro CPUs, which contained 5.5 million transistors. In early 1999, the Pentium II was superseded by the Pentium III.

In 1998, Intel stratified the Pentium II family by releasing the Pentium II-based Celeron line of processors for low-end workstations and the Pentium II Xeon line for servers and high-end workstations. The Celeron was characterized by a reduced or omitted (in some cases present but disabled) on-die full-speed L2 cache and a 66 MT/s FSB. The Xeon was characterized by a range of full-speed L2 cache (from 512 KiB to 2048 KiB), a 100 MT/s FSB, a different physical interface (Slot 2), and support for symmetric multiprocessing.