Karbosguide.com - Module 3e.07c

The further development of Pentium III

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Pentium III
The Pentium 4

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CuMine in year 2000

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Here we shall look at the further development of Pentium III.

Athlon was not not good for Intel

In the first months of 2000 it was obvious that Intel had a hard time with Pentium III. From unknown reasons, they were not capable of producing the CPUs the market wanted. In Denmark we could get all the Athlons needed in February, but only very few Pentium IIIs.

At the same time AMD showed up with faster and cheaper versions of the Athlon - all putting a heavy pressure on Intel.

Intel on their side launched a lot of new models. On Jan 11th, 2000 the 800 MHz version was launched running 6 x 133 MHz. In February the company showed a Pentium III running at 1 Ghz without special cooling.

The 850 and 866 MHz were scheduled for February 27/28, 2000. The 933 MHz model came May 27, 2000. This way Intel tried to prove, that they are keeping up with AMD. However in the real world, they were not, being unable to supply the market with processors. In the same period thousands of the competing 650 and 700 MHz AMD Athlons were sold every week.

In the summer 2000, a 1,113 MHz version of Pentium III was taken out of the market due to unstability, and it appears that 1000 MHz is going to be the topmodel of Pentium III. Pentium 4 is heading for 2 GHz in 2001.

The last Pentium III

The interesting issue is, which version of Pentium III to be the last one. If we look at the scheme, we see that Pentium III is bulding on pretty old technology, namely the P6 core:

The P6 core

It was expected, that the P6 line of processors would end with CuMine. However, Intel seems to have decided to continue the line one more year:

The "Tualatin" core

In August 2001 Intel launched the 0.13 micron version of Pentium III, which has been known as codename "Tualatin" (Intel's codenames is from rivers in the pacific Northwest of the USA). This processor uses copper interconnects.

The new processor is a Pentium III "Cumine" with 256 or 512 KB L2 cache integrated. Hardware data prefecth is a new feature, which gives an 8-10% increase in performance.

It runs on 1.475 Volt and is mounted in a Socket370. The Tualatin comes in 1.2 and 1.13 GHz versions, both using a 133 MHz Front Side Bus.

The Intel i815EEA chipset is designed to this processor as well as VIA Apollo Pro 266T. The latest gives support for DDR RAM.

Marketing ...

This the last Pentium III processor has not been advertised very much. Probably Intel does not want it to compete with the 1.4 GHz Pentium 4. Many people was looking forward to the 1.2 GHZ model with 512 KB cache. However this one is only sold for use in servers and in mobile PCs - not for desktop use!

The Pentium 4

The roadmap Intel made several years ago was to abandon the P6 core in favour of a completely new core. The processor codenamed "Willamette" should be the first of a new line of IA32 processors, which should be marketed side-by-side to the IA64 Itanium ("Merced"):

The P7 core

Read about the Pentium 4 in a following module.

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The Pentium 4

Read about chip sets on the motherboard in module 2d