Exactly. Intel never intended DOS / Win95 as target audience when they designed the Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro was meant as "s […]
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Horun wrote on 2024-04-19, 02:23:
Agree with all the answers. There is something special about a P.Pro even though it is not optimized for 16bit OS it is superb in full 32bit OS compared to Pentium.
Exactly. Intel never intended DOS / Win95 as target audience when they designed the Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro was meant as "serious workstation / server" processor, running operating systems like Unix (not specifically Linux, as that system was not popular yet when the Pentium Pro was designed) or Windows NT. Spending effort and money on getting a Pentium Pro system up and running just to use it for DOS and Windows 95 is quite pointless, unless you do it for "having a Pentium Pro system". Parts for a 300MHz Pentium II system should be easier and cheaper to get than parts for a 200MHz Pentium Pro system, and the Pentium II system should outperform the Pentium Pro system in most serious applications due to the higher clock frequency. Also I doubt you can get AGP-equipped mainboard for the Pentium Pro, which also is a point for building a Pentium II system as gaming rig. I don't know of a single selling point of the Pentium Pro that is relevant for retro gaming machines, and I also don't know any Windows 95 software specifically targetting the Pentium Pro and being dependent on the very fast (for the time) L2 cache you can use to show off the "full-speed L2 cache", and which will be considerably slower per MHz on a Pentium II system.
Technically, the Pentium Pro is very similar to a Pentium II, so I wouldn't think of it as a "Pentium Xeon" from that point of view, but more as a "Pentium II precursor". Yet, the original Pentium II had the on-processor-PCB L2 cache at half the clock rate, while the Pentium Pro had it operate at full clock rate, so as the Pentium II was introduced, it was more like the Pentium II is the "Pentium Pro cost-reduced" (and with MMX added, and possibly with some optimizations for 16-bit software).
On the other hand, looking at target audience instead of technology, it is sensible to consider the Pentium Pro as "Pentium Xeon": It was sold at the same time as the Pentium (especially the Pentium MMX), but while the Pentium MMX had desktop users with Windows 95 and/or DOS as target, the Pentium Pro targeted "heavy machines", which is exactly how the market is still divided into "Xeon" and "Pentium" branded processors.