Chapter 31. Pentium® III Software Enhancements

The Previous Chapter

This chapter provided a description of the Pentium® III processor's hardware design characteristics. This included:

  • One product = three product lines.

  • Pentium® II/Pentium® III differences.

  • The Pentium® III/Xeon/Celeron roadmap.

  • The L1 Caches.

  • The L2 Cache.

  • The Data Prefetcher.

  • SSE introduced.

  • The WCBs were enhanced.

  • Additional Writeback Buffers.

  • SpeedStep Technology.

This Chapter

This chapter provides a detailed description of the software enhancements introduced in the Pentium® III processor. This discussion is directly applicable to all subsequent IA32 processors. It includes:

  • The Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE).

  • The SIMD FP exception.

  • The Serial Number feature. This feature was discontinued ...

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