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The Pentium III was introduced on February 26th, 1999. Initial Pentium III processors where very closely related to the Pentium II, adding SSE instructions and an improved L1 cache controller to the basic ingredients of the Deschutes core. This brought on a small IPC (Instructions Per Clock) improvement over the Deschutes core along with the clock speed being scaled up to 600MHz.
On September 27th of the same year the 'Katmai B' was released, keeping the same fundamental core but increasing the front side bus speed from 100MHz to 133MHz. All Katmai cores kept the off-die L2 cache, 512KiB running at half the core clock speed, and used an SECC2 Slot 1 package.
The Coppermine core was released in October 1999 and saw a major overhaul of P6 architecture.
The L2 cache size was slashed in half to 256KiB but this was integrated into the die itself. Unlike Pentium Pro, but like the Mendocine Celeron and some mobile Pentium II's this was built completely into the main die and was not a separate die fused to the main CPU.
Also fixed was a pipeline stall issue which had caused performance bottlenecks in the P6 architecture which helped bring an IPC improvement of up to 30% over the Katmai core processors.
Various speed increases were released over time, up to 1GHz, until in 2000 the 1.1 and 1.13GHz parts were released. However these proved to not be 100% reliable with some reviewers finding they failed tests such as compiling a Linux kernel, with the issue being traced to problems running the L2 cache above 1GHz.
The parts were recalled and the problem rectified, but not until approximately 6 months later.
The Coppermine was also apparently revised to a modified core called the Coppermine-T, but some confusion exists as to whether this was released and if so what classifies as a Coppermine-T, some say a cD0 stepping Coppermine, others chips with an IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader).
The P6 core came to an end with the Tualatin core. This saw the Coppermine core migrated to a 130nm process. Two versions of this existed, one with 256KiB and a 512KiB version known as the Pentium III-S.
The Pentium III-S is generally regarded as the ultimate Pentium III, with clock speeds up to 1.4GHz, a short pipeline, 512KiB and relatively low power consumption offering very respectable performance
compared to the Pentium 4's of the day, and it was aimed at the blade server market where high performance and low power consumption is critical. Even today it commands a price premium on eBay and is a fairly rare chip.
| Derivative |
Interface |
FSB Frequency |
Clock Frequencies (MHz) |
Technologies |
| Katmai |
Slot 1 |
100MHz |
450, 500, 550, 600 |
250nm process, MMX and SSE SIMD Instructions |
| Katmai 'B' |
Slot 1 |
133MHz |
533, 600 |
| Coppermine |
Slot 1
FC-PGA
FC-PGA2 |
100, 133MHz
(133MHz = EB) |
500, 533EB, 550, 600, 600EB, 650, 667EB, 700, 733EB, 750, 800, 800EB, 850, 866EB, 900, 933EB, 1000, 1000EB, 1100, 1133EB |
180nm process, MMX and SSE SIMD Instructions, 256KiB on-die L2 cache |
| Tualatin |
FC-PGA2 |
133MHz |
1000, 1133, 1200, 1333 |
130nm process, MMX and SSE SIMD Instructions, 256KiB on-die L2 cache |
| Tualatin 512KiB |
1133, 1266, 1400 |
130nm process, MMX and SSE SIMD Instructions, 512KiB on-die L2 cache |
Owned by myself from new. Katmai core.
Fully working.
Pulled from a system in a lab bin. Coppermine core in a Slot 1 SECC2 package.
Untested.
Pulled from a live system that had been replaced and was being binned. Coppermine core in a Socket 370 package.
Purchased from eBay. Unboxed but in good condition, fully working.
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