Investigating the SEC

The SEC cartridge sits in Slot 1 on the motherboard, a design feature that saves system real estate and power. If you break open the SEC cartridge (which, incidentally, renders it useless), you'll see the circuit board. This contains the CPU, cache chips, and some of the core logic (for more information see the Eval "The Pentium II Revealed").

The CPU is manufactured on a 0.35-micron process and contains 7.5 million transistors. It uses both buses simultaneously, thanks to the superpipelined microarchitecture. The pipeline of the P6 family contains 12 stages and uses dynamic execution, with two-level adaptive training and branch-prediction me chanisms. These combined processing techniques speed up software performance by up to three instructions per clock cycle.

All cache is located on the SEC cartridge's circuit board. Next to the CPU chip is 512 KB of level 2 pipeline burst; placement here helps the PII achieve its improved performance. A full 32 KB of level-1 cache (16 KB to handle data and 16 KB to handle instructions) is integrated into the CPU chip itself.

Other advantages of the SEC cartridge involve lowered production costs. Intel can employ current manufacturing techniques and still obtain very high frequencies; the company can then pass the resulting cost savings along to the consumer.

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Under the SEC

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