P3 Details/Future Plans

Pentium III Highlights

The Pentium III 1.13GHz is based on the same 0.18-micron manufacturing process used by the other "Coppermine" Pentium III processors. That means you'll get 256K of advanced transfer cache, 133MHz system bus support, advanced system buffering, and Intel's freshest set of streaming SIMD instructions (also known as SSE).

To briefly summarize, (more details can be found in our P3-600E overclocking article) the "advanced transfer cache" refers to the 256-bit interface to the 256K of 8-way associative Level 2 (L2) cache integrated on the processor core running at the same speed as the microprocessor. Older "Katmai" Pentium IIIs had a 64-bit interface to 512K of 4-way associative L2 cache running at half the speed of the processor.

The faster system bus offers a 33% increase in bandwidth over the traditional 100MHz bus speed, and with advanced system buffering, the buffer sizes and bus queue entries have been optimized (increased) to more efficiently utilize the bandwidth of the system bus.

Finally, Intel's SSE instructions are added to improve performance in MPEG2 audio/video encoding and decoding, reduced CPU utilization for speech recognition programs, and improved performance in games.

With the 1.13GHz Pentium III, the core voltage has been increased to 1.75V. Pentium III 933s and 1GHz require 1.70V while slower Pentium IIIs run at 1.65V. Since the processor is based on the Slot 1 SECC2 packaging, system manufacturers are left with one option - the 820 chipset. To date, no motherboard manufacturer has announced plans to release a Slot 1 815 motherboard.

The Future

Speaking of plans, this won't be the last Pentium III processor released by Intel. According to reports, Intel plans to shift the Pentium III core to the 0.13-micron process with copper metalization technology.

In addition, this new 0.13-micron core is expected to support a 200MHz system bus in the same implementation as AMD's Athlon processor. Clock speeds are expected to ramp up to 1.4-1.5GHz over the next 12 months with its introduction currently set for the beginning of 2001.