Performance
Performance with 32-bit code was excellent and well ahead of the older Pentiums at the time, usually by 25-35%. However, Pentium Pro's 16-bit performance was the same as the original Pentium. It was this, along with the Pentium Pro's high price, that caused the rather lackluster reception among PC enthusiasts, given the dominance at the time of the 16-bit MS-DOS, 16/32-bit Windows 3.1x, and 32/16-bit Windows 95 (parts of Windows 95, such as USER.exe, were still mostly 16-bit). To gain the full advantages of Pentium Pro's P6 microarchitecture, one needed to run a fully 32-bit OS such as Windows NT 3.51, Linux, Unix, or OS/2.
No Pentium Pro model implemented MMX, which reduced performance in many multimedia applications.
Compared to RISC microprocessors, the Pentium Pro, when introduced, slightly outperformed the fastest RISC microprocessors on integer performance when running the SPECint95 benchmark, but floating-point performance was significantly lower, half of some RISC microprocessors. The Pentium Pro's integer performance lead disappeared rapidly, first overtaken by the MIPS Technologies R10000 in January 1996, and then by Digital Equipment Corporation's EV56 variant of the Alpha 21164.
Read more about this topic: Pentium Pro
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