Discuss some features of Pentium series of microprocessors.
The Pentium is a CISC microprocessor, 32-bit superscalar. The term superscalar is utilized for the processor that contains more than one pipeline to execute more than one instruction concurrently in parallel.
The major features of Pentium are, this has two ALU's, one floating-point unit, pre-fetch buffers, two 8 KB cache and a branch target buffer. Two ALU's implies that there are two pipelines. All ALU contains five functional units. These two pipelines are integer pipelines. They are as U and V pipeline.
While Pentium was introduced, its operating frequency was 60 MHz slowly; the operating frequency was increased to 233 MHz. The Pentium utilizes 0.6 micron Bi-CMOS process technology. This uses power management characteristic.
The memory management is enhanced by adding paging unit and a latest system memory-management mode.
Paging Unit:
It is the paging mechanism function along with 4K - byte memory pages or along with a new extension obtainable to the Pentium with 4M byte-memory pages. Within the Pentium, with the new 4M-byte paging feature memory for the page-table decreased to single page table.
Memory-management mode: The SMM stand for system memory-management mode is on similar level as protected mode, virtual mode and real mode, but it is given to function as a manager. The system memory-management is not intended to be used as an application or a system level task. This is intended for high-level system functions like power management.