Today I found my iPhone lying next to the display case you can see in the picture.
To me it was fascinating to see the hugeness of the Pentium II CPU whose circuit board is bigger than my entire mobile phone.
But nevertheless it couldn’t even nearly reach the computing power of my beloved super-mobile computer, consumes much more energy and produces a massive amount of waste heat.
The reason why Intel switched to a circuit board design for this CPU was due to technical difficulties.
Back in that time the technology wasn’t advanced enough to fit the L2 Cache onto the die of the CPU like nowadays.
The Pentium II you can see in the picture is one of the first series with the name “Klamath”, shipped with clock speeds of 233, 266 and 300 MHz.
12 years have passed since the first Pentium II hit the market and look how far we have come.
I’m wondering how it will be when I look back 12 years anew in 2021…