Xeon (pronounced ZEE-ahn ) is a 400 MHz Pentium microprocessor from Intel for use in "mid-range" enterprise servers and workstations. On a server motherboard from Intel, up to eight (and later even more) Xeon processors will be able to do multiprocessing sharing the same 100 Mhz bus. Xeon is replacing the Pentium Pro as Intel's main enterprise microchip. Xeon is designed for Internet and large transactional database servers as well as for engineering, graphics, and multimedia applications that require moving a lot of data around quickly. Xeon is the high end of the Pentium line ( Celeron is the low end).

Xeon is based on the Pentium microprocessor's P6 architecture. It's designed to work with a new and faster Peripheral Component Interconnect bus and Accelerated Graphics Port . Xeon features:

• A faster L1 and L2 cache , either 512 Kbytes or 1 Mbyte, that runs at the same 400 Mhz clock speed of the processor.
• A faster bus to carry data between the processor, RAM, and I/O devices. The 450NX PCIset is a chipset that works at a 100 Mhz clock speed and supports up to 8 GB of extended data output RAM memory.
• A larger Accelerated Graphics Port ( AGP ) chip set called the 440GX AGPset that also runs at 100 Mhz. It supports 2 GB of 100 Mhz SDRAM .
• An extended server memory architecture that provide for 36-bit addresses, allowing up to 64 GB of physical memory to be addressed.
• Everything premounted in a motherboard package for faster manufacturing

Typically, a computer with a Xeon microprocessor would use a Windows NT , NetWare , or UNIX operating system. Xeon-based systems are expected to offer competition to Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and others in the workstation market, but its primary market is expected to be the mid-range server.

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