The last time we went down this road, it seemed as though Intel was going to let loose their Coppermine in September to coincide with their 820 (Camino) chipset. But the big news is that Intel currently doesn't seem to be content enough with their high-end 600+MHz bins. The word on the street is that Coppermine .18micron 600MHz and above CPUs won't start coming out until November, a delay of two months.

Reasoning might well point at possible issues with the .18micron process but to the contrary, Intel seems to be on the ball with that. Another change should see the introduction of the 500MHz FC-PGA Coppermine as early as October. These will obviously be targeted at the small form-factor all-in-one designs. And just for the record, when the Coppermine does come out (in case any of you were unsure) it's still going to be branded a Pentium III product by Intel with SSE becoming more widely used (at least Intel hopes). The same is true for Coppermines that go into next year ranging from 667MHz (to be released in Q1 2000) up to 733MHz (to be released in Q2 2000).

Intel's response to a strong demand (and indeed somewhat better than originally forecasted) for .25 micron based Pentium IIIs (Katmai) has been a natural one. The strong ramp will (as some of you more pedantic SE readers already know) continue with the launch of a 600MHz/100MHZ FSB Pentium III in early August which is slightly earlier than previously expected. The .25micron yields have obviously proven to be too good of a thing to pass by. The price of this high-end CPU has also been slashed a little and should set you back around $670, making the war with Athlon an interesting one to say the least. Along with the launch of this 600MHz part you can of course expect some major price-cuts to the older Pentium IIIs. These price-cuts are actually driving Intel's hopes for a 'clean sweep' of the Pentium III for top-to-bottom Mainstream/Performance system offerings during the Q4 shopping spree season.