The
Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation
x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by
Intel introduced in November 1, 1995. It introduced the
P6 microarchitecture (sometimes referred to as i686) and was originally intended to replace the original
Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million
transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in
supercomputers like
ASCI Red, the first computer to reach the
teraFLOPS performance mark. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular
Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the
Pentium II Xeon in 1998.