Intel Pentium II

Microarchitecture: P6

Being based on the new P6, or i686 architecture, the Pentium II would radically alter the way Intel's CPUs connected to their motherboards. Rather than a traditional socket-based approach, the Pentium II came on what Intel dubbed "SECC" (Single Edge Card Contact) cartridges, which integrated L2 cache onto the same module as the CPU core. This was done in favor of the primarily motherboard-centric L2 cache configuration popular at the time, where the motherboard itself contained the L2 cache chips and any associated tag RAM.

Variant: Klamath
The original Pentium II. These chips have a combined tag RAM and L2 cache controller, which resulted in the cacheable RAM amount to be limited to 512MB, as opposed to the 4GB cacheable with the Pentium Pro line of chips.

Variant: Deschutes
A die shrink of the previous Klamath core, with various minor improvements. Later models would switch to a flip-chip design that exposed the die to the heatsink. Additionally, late-model 333MHz Pentium IIs were discovered to be able to run at up to, and occasionally above 500MHz thanks to the fact that they simply had the 100MHz Front-Side-Bus option disabled. Re-enabling this option was an easy way to gain extra performance from these chips.

The Pentium II Xeon also marked the first use of Intel's Xeon branding for workstation and server-centric chips. It utilized a Deschutes core, coupled with full-speed L2 cache.

Variant: Tonga
A mobile variant of the Pentium II, which, based on its family and model numbers, is likely based on the Deschutes core.

Variant: Dixon
The fastest variant of the Pentium II, thanks to its use of full-speed, on-die L2 cache. A successor to the Tonga variant in the mobile market.