The Pentium® II Xeon™ processor is a follow-on to the Pentium Pro and Pentium II family of microprocessors and is the first 100 MHz Slot 2 processor. The design of the external Pentium II Xeon processor bus enables the Pentium II Xeon processor to be “multiprocessor ready.” To relax timing constraints on a bus that supports up to six loads, the Pentium II Xeon processor implements a synchronous, latched bus protocol that allows a full clock cycle for signal transmission and a full clock cycle for signal interpretation and generation.