Intel Core (microarchitecture) - Steppings

Steppings

The Core microarchitecture uses a number of steppings, which unlike previous microarchitectures not only represent incremental improvements but also different sets of features like cache size and low power modes. Most of these steppings are used across brands, typically by disabling some of the features and limiting clock frequencies on low-end chips.

Steppings with a reduced cache size use a separate naming scheme, which means that the releases are no longer in alphabetic order. Additional steppings have been used in internal and engineering samples, but are not listed in the tables.

Many of the high-end Core 2 and Xeon processors use Multi-Chip Modules of two or three chips in order to get larger cache sizes or more than two cores.