The Pentium processor-90/100, microarchitecture and low power circuit design

This paper describes the implementation of the Pentium processor (73590,815100), referred to as the Pentium processor-90/100 from now on, on a 3.3V, 0.6 micron BiNMOS process. The processor achieves significantly higher performance over the previous generation Pentium processor, with reduced power consumption, and a smaller die area (12.76 mm each side). A symmetric dual processing feature is also supported that provides even greater performance advantages for multithreaded operating systems such as Windows NT. Aggressive frequency targets (100 MHz) were achieved through innovative circuit design techniques. This paper also briefly discusses some of the key technology improvements that enabled such aggressive performance goals to be met.