Question about the Pentium 2

[I.S.T.]

I'm doing some reading on older CPU archs, and I found my way to info about the Klamath core in the Pentium 2. The Wikipedia article on it says that its 16 bit performance was improved over the P6 core's by a fair bit, but doesn't say how. What did Intel change to fix this?

 

[Gubbi]

I'm doing some reading on older CPU archs, and I found my way to info about the Klamath core in the Pentium 2. The Wikipedia article on it says that its 16 bit performance was improved over the P6 core's by a fair bit, but doesn't say how. What did Intel change to fix this?

Partial register updates.

If you only update part of a register and subsequently read from it you'd get a delay of 5-6 cycles instead of one; Ie. write to AX and read EAX would stall the P6.

Intel/the P6 design team completely underestimated the amount of 16bit code being run (DOS and Windows 3.11/95).

Cheers

 

[I.S.T.]

Partial register updates.

If you only update part of a register and subsequently read from it you'd get a delay of 5-6 cycles instead of one; Ie. write to AX and read EAX would stall the P6.

Intel/the P6 design team completely underestimated the amount of 16bit code being run (DOS and Windows 3.11/95).

Cheers

Thanks. It's hard to find info on old Intel processors that aren't things like the 486 or their microcontrollers.