Pentium II Xeon

Xeon does have some new technologies designed for enterprise servers, where the chips are aimed. One of the more significant functions is PSE36, 36-bit memory addressing technology that lets a Xeon chip access up to 64 GBs of memory. The Pentium II (and all previous processors since the 386), by contrast, can only access 4 GBs of memory. Unfortunately, the 450NX chip set, which will be built into all first-generation Slot 2 motherboards, can only address up to 8 GBs of memory. Future chip sets will be able to take full advantage of the 64-GB range.

Unfortunately, with great performance comes great price. The Xeon will definitely not be seen in many home PC's, because of it's high price tag - the 512k version will cost $1,124, while the 1-MB cache version will sell for $2,836 (in lots of 1000).

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