We keep waiting for some retail game title or demo debuts that will highlight and show off the Pentium(r) III's SSE instruction set, but to no avail. It looks like we'll have to wait until larger titles like Quake3 Arena are released sometime towards the later half of 99 before we see the effects of the optimized geometry pipeline that SSE enables. Until then, we'll continue to use the only SSE-capable test that even half-way simulates an actual game environment, 3D WinBench99's Lighting and Transformation Test.

Sharky's favorite next-generation CPU (and that includes the K7) is Intel(r)'s "Coppermine", which promises dramatic performance improvements beyond today's P3-500 high end CPU. Besides improvements that will occur with the P3 itself, Coppermine also heralds the arrival of the AGP 4X implementing Camino mainboard core logic chipset.

Here are the specs for Coppermine, which will simply be called "Pentium(r) 3 600" when it (along with Camino) debuts in September:

• .18 micron manufacturing process
• 600MHz core speed
• 133MHz Front Side Bus speed
• 64Kb of L1 cache
• 256Kb of L2 cache (on-die, and running at the full core speed, as with current Celeron(tm) CPUs)

Now a CPU with Coppermine's specifications could possibly warrant a massive $700 price tag in our minds, as it will deliver approximately 25 to 40% more raw gaming performance than the current $700 P3-500 CPU does. Until September comes around, the P3-500 is the most powerful mainstream CPU available for purchase.

Let's take a look now at the P3-500's overclockability, and see if we can simulate some future P3 performance levels today.