The
Pentium II brand refers to
Intel's sixth-generation
microarchitecture ("
P6") and
x86-compatible
microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million
transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256
KB L2 cache), the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first
P6-generation core of the
Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to Pentium Pros. In early 1999, the Pentium II was superseded by the almost identical
Pentium III, which basically only added SSE instructions to the CPU.