Pentium Pro - Upgrade Paths

Upgrade Paths

In 1998, the 300/333 MHz Pentium II Overdrive processor for Socket 8 was released. Featuring 512 KiB of full-speed cache, it was produced by Intel as a drop-in upgrade option for owners of Pentium Pro systems. However, it only supported two-way glueless multiprocessing, not four-way or higher, which did not make it a usable upgrade for quad-processor systems. These specially packaged Pentium II Xeon processors were used to upgrade ASCI Red, which became the first computer to reach the TeraFlop performance mark with the Pentium Pro processor and then the first to exceed 2 TeraFlops after the upgrade to Pentium II Xeon processors.

As Slot 1 motherboards became prevalent, several manufacturers released slocket adapters, such as the Tyan M2020, Asus C-P6S1, Tekram P6SL1, and the Abit KP6. The slockets allowed Pentium Pro processors to be used with Slot 1 motherboards. The Intel 440FX chipset explicitly supported both Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors, but the Intel 440BX and later Slot 1 chipsets did not explicitly support the Pentium Pro, so the Socket 8 slockets did not see wide use. Slockets—in the form of Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapters—saw renewed popularity when Intel introduced Socket 370 Celeron and Pentium III processors.