Introduction
Intel's
release of 15 new Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon processors, built
using advanced Intel 0.18-micron process technology, can be better analyzed
by looking at three categories of products -- for the desktop market
there are 9 new processors; for the portable market there are 3 new
mobile processors; and for the workstation/server market there are 3
new Xeon chips, as well as the often overlooked simultaneous introduction
of the new Carmel 840 chipset, with its Rambus and 4X AGP support.
The complete lineup of Intel Pentium chips introduced includes:
Pentium
III Xeon 600,
Pentium III Xeon 667, and
Pentium III Xeon 733MHz -- all with 133MHz system bus;
Pentium III/533 EB,
Pentium III/600 EB,
Pentium III/667, and
Pentium III/733 -- all with 133MHz system bus;
Pentium
III-500E (in FCPGA package),
Pentium III 550E (in FCPGA package),
Pentium III-600E,
Pentium III-650,
Pentium III-700 (all with 100MHz system bus); and
Mobile Pentium III 400,
Mobile Pentium III 450, and
Mobile Pentium III 500 (all with 100MHz system bus).
The "E" or enhanced designation means that the chip is based on Intel's
Coppermine technology, as all of these new chips are. The "B" designates
the chips as having a 133MHz bus. The E is only used when an older 0.25-micron
Pentium III chip of that speed exists.
Of
these announcements, the introduction that will most immediately have
the most impact is that of the smaller size, lower power, faster Mobile
Pentium III. Already a host of laptop manufacturers have introduced
a range of notebooks based on the new 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz chips.
For a discussion of this new technology and a look at some of these
new systems click here.
All of the new 0.18-micron Coppermine chips feature lower voltages and
several new data-moving technologies, including increased bus bandwidth,
and improvements in caching and system buffering. The bus bandwidth
increase from 100MHz to 133MHz on some of the chips means data can be
transferred more rapidly to and from the system components.
The decrease in die size from 0.25-micron to 0.18-micron technology
allows 256K Level 2 cache to be integrated right onto the chips. This
256K Advanced Transfer Cache is used to avoid sending requests via the
slower system bus to main memory, and works at the full speed of the
processor. The cache keeps data an application will need on hand near
the CPU. Older PIII chips relied on 512K off-chip Level 2 caches running
at half the processor's speed.
Advanced system buffering on the new Pentium IIIs allows the chip to
use its processing power more efficiently. The system buffering technology
is designed to queue up information faster via optimizations in the
system bus buffer sizes and bus queue entries that result in an increase
in the utilization of the available bandwidth on the 100 and 133 MHz
system bus. The chip now contains 4 writeback buffers, 6 fill buffers
and 8 bus queue entries.
Intel's Pentium III Coppermine chips are expected to reach 800MHz
speeds by early next year. The speeds will likely top out around 900MHz
by the end of next year, at which point Intel will introduce a new processor
architecture (code-named Willamette) with 1GHz and faster speeds.
proceed
to Workstations
