BELIEVE IT or believe it not, there are still some Pentium Pro microprocessors and Pentium IIs in use out there in the real world. Probably quite a lot of them.

What fabulous chips they were.

But the sad fact is that Microsoft and Intel have announced that Windows Server 2003, the latest and greatest Voleware, won't use the massive computing power of the Pentium Pro nor will it support multiple CPUs of the equally fabulous Pentium II.

At install, if you have such systems, you will get a message saying that your multiprocessor configuration is unsupported.

This will no doubt puzzle you until you root around in the Vole's technical burrow, otherwise known as the knowledge base, where you will find this statement, eventually.

"Intel discovered that if you use Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors in computers that have two or more processors, the transaction lookaside buffer may be corrupted. The corruption of the lookaside buffer may cause computer instability, data corruption, or other unpredictable results. "

So if you've a dual system using the Pentium Pro or the Pentium II, you'll find it's useless for multiprocessing.

A reader who has encountered the problem says that his Pentium Pro system may, however, be useful for heating up his room during feast of King Wenceslas.

He also dug out the errata for the CPUs on Her Indoors' (Intel's) site, and discovered errata numbers 63 and 69, which seem to describe that the problem is.

The errata refer to a problem when an operating system uses lazy TLB shootdown.

Source: The Inquirer