It's been a long, hot and sticky month since we reviewed the Intel Pentium III 1.13GHz. Not only has availability been an issue but as of this morning Kyle Bennett of HardOCP sent me an Email detailing some of the work he did jointly with Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware Guide and Anand from AnandTech. The joint article pointed out some serious issues with Intel's newest release causing intermittent Sysmark2000 and Linux Kernel Compilation failures.
We have also been called today by George Alfs of Intel who let us know the failures have been reproduced in the Intel labs this weekend and hence the recall of all 1.13GHz chips. He let us know that they will be refunding and replacing all 1.13GHz CPUs. Although there have not been many 1.13GHz CPUs that made it to market, they will all now be recalled.
We have not performed the Linux Kernel tests nor have we had issues with SYSMark 2000 yet. The offer's open though and we'll talk to Kyle about playing around with our CPU (which seemed to work as well as Anand's did) so he can test it under the same conditions that the others were tested. Anyway, I just wanted to update the review from last month with this information that was discovered by Kyle Bennett (Kyle might end up owning more 1.13GHz CPUs than anyone else on the planet at this rate) and Thomas Pabst. With the release of the 1.1GHz Athlon having been today (co-incidentally) it's not been a good Monday morning for the boys in blue...
The various article I've talked about can be found here:
Tom's piece
Kyle's piece
John Spooner's piece
[RESUME ORIGINAL REVIEW]
Price: $990 (only through certain OEMs)
Availability: Depends on OEM
Several months ago, both Intel and AMD stretched their processor technologies in order to reach 1GHz. With a last minute effort, AMD managed to slip ahead of Intel by a matter of days. Since then, the CPU speed wars have taken a breather as Intel and AMD filled in the gap left by the jump to 1GHz. Not long after Intel released their Pentium III 933MHz, AMD regained the speed edge from Intel by releasing their new Athlon "Thunderbird".
Today, far from the ice planet Hoth, the Empire strikes back! Intel has announced their Pentium III 1.13GHz, the first consumer CPU to surpass 1GHz. Thankfully, Intel has abandoned the meager 33 and 66MHz jumps of the past in favor of a nice, large, 133MHz jump. We tested this new processor, forcing it to jump through various hoops, leap tall buildings in a single bound, and burn through several benchmarks with its laser vision in order to bring you this review today.
What really powers the 1.13GHz
The Pentium III 1.13GHz is in no way a revolutionary chip when compared to its Pentium III Coppermine siblings on an architectural level. Ever since the first Intel Pentium III Coppermine, the architecture of the Pentium III series has stayed static. Other than process work done in order to achieve acceptable yields at 1.13GHz, there are no major differences between the 1.13GHz version and the 933MHz or 1GHz Pentium III. Unfortunately, like the Pentium III 1GHz version, the Pentium III 1.13GHz will only be available in complete systems from certain high-end OEMs. We expect Dell and IBM to have systems, and possibly others. Sorry, but you can't buy one and stick it in your system.
The processor uses an 8.5x multiplier matched to a 133MHz FSB (Front Side Bus) to reach 1.13GHz. The 133MHz FSB has two advantages over the older 100MHz FSB. First, the extra 33MHz gives the processor an additional 33% bandwidth boost. Second, the faster FSB allows higher clock speeds with lower multipliers. But Intel's bus does not compare in overall bandwidth to AMD's 200MHz FSB.
Because we have gone through it so many times before, we will spare you the in-depth discussion of the Coppermine architecture and just give you the highlights.