Going by the title, half of this book, which is otherwise well presented, already appears to be outdated, because the Pentium Pro has ceased to be significant in the commercial chip market. Nevertheless, as an extension of MindShare’s series of publications covering the x86 processor architecture to the Pentium II processor, this book can serve as a good reference for hardware designers involved with PC architecture, as well as for people developing system software using assembly code. While readers who are not conversant with the x86 processor architecture will not benefit from it, those wanting to know about the deployment of the existing and upcoming technologies of the P6 microarchitecture in Xeon or Celeron processors will also be disappointed, since the book does not cover these. This is a niche book, focusing on differences between the Pentium Pro and Pentium II implementations.
Spanning 28 chapters and an appendix, the book consists of five parts:
System Overview
Processor’s Hardware Characteristics
Pentium II Processor
Processor’s Software Characteristics
Overview of Intel Pentium Pro Chipsets
Part 1 provides a basic description of a typical server’s architecture in terms of the relationships among the processors, caches, memory, host/PCI bridges, and so on. Part 2 describes the internal and external hardware characteristics of the processor. Part 3 describes the Pentium II processor and explains how it differs from the Pentium Pro. Part 4 describes the software environment enhancements for the Pentium Pro processor, and Part 5 provides an overview of the Intel 450KX, 450GX, and 450FX chipsets. I wish the 450NX/440GX PCI sets used in today’s Xeon processor had been included. The appendix includes details of the memory type and range registers (MTRRs).
Though chipset professionals who are following the evolution of microprocessor architecture closely will find this book a handy reference, practicing IT professionals and CIOs might be more interested in the deployment of P6 microarchitecture technologies, such as the Dual Independent Bus Architecture, Dynamic Execution, or MMX, on desktop, server, or mobile processors. Such material would help them choose between the Xeon and Celeron chips, rather than between the Pentium II and Pentium Pro. Of course, undergraduate computer science students might find this text useful for keeping track of the evolution of chip architectures.
One strength of this book is its cogent presentation. Each of the chapters, sections, and parts is logically linked to the previous and following units, so readers will not get lost in the otherwise difficult terrain of microprocessor architecture. The book is firmly focused on its niche purpose. Its utility will be limited to the next couple of years, if not less. To be fair to the author, this limitation exiists because of the subject matter, despite his excellent presentation.
