Launched in February of 1999, the Pentium III is Intel's latest entry in a long line of high performance desktop oriented CPUs.
Available in speed levels of 450, 500, 550, and 600MHz, the Pentium III has sold in record levels since it hit the market, largely due to its lone status as the fastest CPU money can buy.
Just recently, with the launch of AMD's Athlon line of high-end CPUs, the Pentium IIIs supremacy is threatened. We'll get to that topic in a moment.
Here's a look at the major technical specs that all Pentium III CPUs currently offer:
- .25 Micron Manufacturing Process
- 32KB of Level 1 Cache (operating at CPU's full core speed)
- 512KB of Level 2 Cache (operating at ½ of CPU's core speed)
- 100MHz Front Side Bus Speed
- SSE Streaming SIMD Enhancements
- Slot-1 SECC2 Form Factor
While not revolutionary versus the previous Pentium II generation of CPUs, the Pentium IIIs are just beginning to fulfill their total potential as more applications debut that support SSE optimization, which the Pentium II and current Celeron CPUs do not offer.
Late in September Intel will likely release two new Pentium III CPUs designed to operate with the company's new i820 mainboard core logic set. i820 brings AGP 4X, 133MHz FSB support and RDRAM to the desktop for the first time and accordingly Intel must release new CPUs that are designed to run on the 133MHz front side bus.