Yes at that time Intel invented the market segmentation between "Pentium" for "consumers" and "Pentium Pro" for big spenders, and to make Pentium Pro more attractive they removed memory errors detection from the "Pentium" chipsets, which is the origin of the current state, when most non-server computers are very vulnerable to memory corruption and nobody can calculate how much money was lost by most computer owners during the last 3 decades, due to the greed of the Intel marketing, because nobody knows how many of the computer crashes or data loss cases that were typically attributed to unknown software bugs were actually caused by memory corruption.
replyBecause this move was a money maker for all involved, all memory producers and also AMD followed immediately the Intel initiative. Memory modules without ECC would have never existed if adequate consumer protection laws had existed.
Yeah, the Pro and MMX were totally different market segments, not alternatives for each other. The Pro's competition at the time was DEC Alpha, PA RISC, etc. It wasn't a chip that made sense for ordinary PC users at the time.
replyLater, when Pentium MMX was eventually replaced by Pentium 2 for consumers, the successor of Pentium Pro was the first Intel Xeon CPU (which was a slightly enhanced Pentium 2, with bigger cache memory and with ECC memory).
replyThe launch of Pentium Pro in 1995 was the moment when Intel segmented their CPU line into CPUs for consumers & server/workstation CPUs.
Just one caveat: the Pro overlapped in time with people running a lot of 16-bit code, and I think the Pentium MMX was faster for that, or at least that the Pro didn't offer much edge.
replyThe pro did register renaming. But the way it worked, if you wrote to AX (16 bit write) and then read from EAX (32 bit read) it caused a pipeline stall from resyncing the registers.
replyYeah, thanks both for elaborating!
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