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The Intel Pentium III Processor
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| The Pentium III is an x86 (more precisely, an i686) architecture microprocessor by Intel, introduced on February 26, 1999. Initial versions were very similar to the earlier Pentium II, the most notable difference being the addition of SSE instructions. As with the Pentium II, there was also a low-end Celeron version and a high-end Xeon version. The Pentium III was eventually superseded by the Pentium 4. An improvement on the Pentium III design is the Pentium M. |
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Intel Pentium III A80525 450 MHz |
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450/512/100/2.0V S1
99180533-0141 MALAY
i(m)(c) '98 SL35D |
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| Core Frequency: | 450 MHz | | Board Frequency: | 100 MHz |
| Clock Multiplier: | 4.5 | | Data bus (ext.): | 64 Bit | | Address bus: | 36 Bit | | Transistors: | 9,500,000 | | Circuit Size: | 0.25 µ | | Core / I/O Voltage: | 2.0 / 3.3 V | | Introduced: | February 26, 1999 | | Manufactured: | week 18/1999 | | Made in: | Malaysia | | L1 Cache: | 16+16 KB | | L2 Cache: | 512 KB | | CPU Code: | Pentium III
Katmai | | Intel S-Spec: |
SL35D |
| Package Type: | SECC2-242 |
| Socket: |
Slot 1 |
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Intel Pentium III A80525 500 MHz |
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500/512/100/2.0VS1
10120311-0087 Philippines
i(m)(c) '98 SL35E |  |
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| Core Frequency: | 500 MHz | | Board Frequency: | 100 MHz |
| Clock Multiplier: | 5.0 | | Data bus (ext.): | 64 Bit | | Address bus: | 36 Bit | | Transistors: | 9,500,000 | | Circuit Size: | 0.25 µ | | Core / I/O Voltage: | 2.0 / 3.3 V | | Introduced: | Feb. 26, 1999 | | Manufactured: | week 12/2000 | | Made in: | Philippines | | L1 Cache: | 16+16 KB | | L2 Cache: | 512 KB | | CPU Code: | Pentium III
Katmai | | Intel S-Spec: |
SL35E |
| Package Type: | SECC2-242 |
| Socket: |
Slot 1 |
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Intel Pentium III A80525 550 MHz |
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550/512/100/2.0V S1
10270371-0253 Philippines
i(m)(c) '98 SL3F7 |
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| Core Frequency: | 550 MHz | | Board Frequency: | 100 MHz |
| Clock Multiplier: | 5.5 | | Data bus (ext.): | 64 Bit | | Address bus: | 36 Bit | | Transistors: | 9,500,000 | | Circuit Size: | 0.25 µ | | Core / I/O Voltage: | 2.0 / 3.3 V | | Introduced: | May 17, 1999 | | Manufactured: | week 27/2000 | | Made in: | Philippines | | L1 Cache: | 16+16 KB | | L2 Cache: | 512 KB | | CPU Code: | Pentium III
Katmai | | Intel S-Spec: |
SL3F7 |
| Package Type: | SECC2-242 |
| Socket: |
Slot 1 |
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Pentium III Coppermine
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The second Pentium III version, Coppermine, had an integrated full-speed 256 KB L2 cache with lower latency, which improved performance over Katmai. Under competitive pressure from AMD's Athlon processor, Intel also re-worked the chip internally, and finally fixed the well known instruction pipeline stalls. The result was a remarkable 30% increase in instruction processing performance.
It was built on a 0.18 µm process. Pentium III Coppermines running at 500, 533, 550, 600, 650, 667, 700, and 733 MHz were first released on October 25, 1999. From December 1999 to May 2000, Intel released Pentium IIIs running at speeds of 750, 800, 850, 866, 900, 933 and 1000 MHz (1GHz).
A 1.13GHz version was released in mid-2000, but famously recalled after a popular hardware review website proved it was not stable enough to compile the Linux kernel. The problem was traced to the integrated cache, which simply could not operate at speeds above 1GHz. Intel needed at least six months to resolve this problem and released 1.1 and 1.13 GHz versions in 2001. |
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The Xbox Processor
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A modified version of Coppermine was developed for Microsoft's Xbox game console. The only significant change was that the chip lost half of its L2 cache, dropping it down to 128 KB. Unlike the Celeron Coppermine variant with the same size L2 cache, Xbox's Coppermine core kept all of its 8-way L2 cache associativity from the Pentium III. This meant that the Xbox CPU's L2 cache was more efficient than Celeron's. The Xbox CPU was manufactured onto the same Micro-PGA2 packaging as notebook chips.
References:
Anandtech |
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Pentium III Tualatin
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The third Pentium III-version, Tualatin, was really just a trial for Intel's new 0.13 µm process. As the Pentium 4 had a much bigger die size than the Pentium III, Intel would get more usable Pentium IIIs out of a wafer, and this would allow them to introduce the 0.13 µm Pentium 4 (Northwood) once the process was achieving optimal yields. Tualatin performed quite well, especially in variations which had 512 KiB L2 cache (called the Pentium III-S). The Pentium III-S variant was mainly intended for servers, especially those where power consumption mattered, i.e., thin blade servers.
Pentium III Tualatins were released during 2001 until early 2002 at speeds of 1.0, 1.13, 1.2, 1.26, 1.33 and 1.4 GHz. Intel did not want a repeat of the situation where the performance of a lower priced Celeron rivaled that of the more expensive Pentium II, so Tualatin never ran faster than 1.4 GHz, the introductory clock rate of the Pentium 4. Overclockers discovered as well that 1.4-1.5 GHz with air-cooled temperatures was reaching the limits of the process and so Intel may have also wanted to avoid sacrificing profits with lower yields of a faster chip.
The Tualatin core was named after the Tualatin Valley and Tualatin River in the Oregon area. Tualatins can be visually distinguished from Coppermine-based Pentium IIIs by the metal heatspreader fixed on top of the package. |
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