The Pentium Pro is by far the CPU I remember being the most surprised about, and I was an engineer at Intel when it was released. Such an amazing design and manufacturing technique, and 200Mhz with 256 or 512k L2 cache! That seemed like such a huge cache at the time. Performance on video codecs with some tweaks was a 2x jump as well. Funny enough I still have a working Pentium Pro 200 system. good times!