State the features of Pentium series of microprocessors:
Pentium is a 32-bit superscalar, CISC microprocessor. The term superscalar is used for processor that contains more than one pipeline to execute more than one instruction concurrently in parallel.
The main aspects of Pentium are, it has two ALU's, one floating-point unit, two 8 KB cache, pre-fetch buffers, a branch target buffer. Two ALU's means that there are two pipelines. Each ALU comprises five functional units. Two pipelines are integer pipelines. They are called U and V pipeline.
When Pentium was introduced, its operating frequency was 60 MHz gradually; operating frequency was raised to 233 MHzthe Pentium uses 0.6 micron Bi-CMOS process technology. It employs power management feature.