Intel has been edging its' way into the industrial server processor market for as long as they've been around, after marketing an expanded Pentium Pro for the server market, their marketing decided to create a separate naming system for their server chips. Thus, they now attach "Xeon" to their x86 server chips.
- The first Intel Xeon, was the Pentium II Xeon, it supports SMP arrangements with more processors than the Pentium II, and it came in different flavors of the same internal clock speed with amounts of L2 Cache ranging from 512, to 2048 Kb, with a front side bus of 100Mhz It connects to the motherboard via a Slot 2 connector.
- The second Xeon, is the Pentium III Xeon. Basically standard improvements in clock speed, as well as the implementation of the SIMD instruction set, and 8-way SMP.
- The Third Xeon, was a standard Pentium 3. Intel released it, and promised to add cache in later versions.
- There are two more versions of Xeon, they are both available today. The Xeon, and the Xeon MP.
- The Xeon is a version of the pentium 4 with multi-processing support, L2 Cache of 512Kb, clock speeds in excess of 3 Ghz, and is capable of 2-way SMP
- The Xeon MP has L2 Cache of either 256K, or 512, and L3 cache between 512, and 2048, and is capable of 8-way SMP.