In this weekends vintage activities – I played around with what is my favorite of all of the x86 processors, the Intel Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro delivered a few key milestones – It was the first x86 processor that employed out-of-order execution, register renaming, and speculative execution. Those microarchitecture features would be carried forward far into the future.

It was the CPU in IBM’s ASCI Red supercomputer, the first supercomputer to surpass the 1 teraFLOPS mark. (Note the graphics card in the computer you are probably using right now is faster than that).

It was also a very unique physical packaging with two dies (CPU and cache) interconnected. The in-package L2 cache was a first for Intel.

I was working at Intel when this was released, and it was an exciting time in microprocessor architecture. I remember reading the data sheet and being amazed at the dynamic execution flow.

For many years following its release it was the processor of choice for workstations and servers, with direct support for 4-way SMP. There were a number of 2-way workstation motherboards available as well. The Pentium Pro was probably the platforms I used for the longest amount of time.

This particular variety was a 440FX(‘Natoma’) Intel motherboard with a 200Mhz, 256KL2 Cache CPU and a ATI Mach 64 video card.

Of course I played Quake on it, and yes I used FastVID. The 90s live on.