CPU

The past two years have seen radical changes to the way CPUs are marketed. It's easy to forget in our current world of $60 Celerons that it wasn't so long ago that Intel didn't market a single CPU to the budget conscious buyer at all.

Add to this AMD's new high-end Athlon CPU, which is the first time AMD has brought a CPU to market that handily equals, if not exceeds, Intel's best, and the need for a concise "Buyer's Guide" for current and future CPUs is clear.

In this inaugural first edition of Sharky Extreme's CPU Buyer's Guide we'll be analyzing the various CPU models available on the market and making recommendations based on our experiences with them. As new CPU models arrive in our test lab in the future, we'll be updating this guide to reflect on their level of performance and desirability as well.

We hope this article can serve as a constant reference for buyers navigating the rough seas of CPU purchasing, please feel free to post your comments or opinions on the Sharky Extreme Discussion Board to help us better serve you in future editions of the guide.

High-End CPUs: If You've Got the money, These Chips Have The Power

Constantly in a state of research and development, high-end CPUs provide the semiconductor manufacturers that make them with the highest degrees of profit margin and revenue out of their entire product line.

For the consumer, high-end CPUs represent performance nirvana, and the pursuit of the fastest PC experience that money can buy. Here's the breakdown on what CPUs constitute the current state of the art at the high-end of the market:

 Launched in February of 1999, the Pentium III is Intel's latest entry in a long line of high performance desktop oriented CPUs.

Available in speed levels of 450, 500, 550, and 600MHz, the Pentium III has sold in record levels since it hit the market, largely due to its lone status as the fastest CPU money can buy.

Just recently, with the launch of AMD's Athlon line of high-end CPUs, the Pentium IIIs supremacy is threatened. We'll get to that topic in a moment.

Here's a look at the major technical specs that all Pentium III CPUs currently offer:

• .25 Micron Manufacturing Process
• 32KB of Level 1 Cache (operating at CPU's full core speed)
• 512KB of Level 2 Cache (operating at ½ of CPU's core speed)
• 100MHz Front Side Bus Speed
• SSE Streaming SIMD Enhancements
• Slot-1 SECC2 Form Factor

Pentium III Future

 Late in September Intel will likely release two new Pentium III CPUs designed to operate with the company's new i820 mainboard core logic set. i820 brings AGP 4X, 133MHz FSB support and RDRAM to the desktop for the first time and accordingly Intel must release new CPUs that are designed to run on the 133MHz front side bus.

Coppermine signals an evolutionary transition for the Pentium III, and offers a host of improvements to the existing Pentium III architecture:

.18 Micron Manufacturing Process 64KB of Level 1 Cache (operating at CPU's full core speed) 256KB of On-Die Level 2 Cache (operating at CPU's full core speed) 133MHz Front Side Bus Speed SSE Streaming SIMD Enhancements Slot-1 SECC2 Form Factor

The most significant improvements that the Coppermine Pentium IIIs will offer over the current generation of Pentium IIIs are the doubling of the existing L1 cache level from 32KB to 64KB and the operation of the L2 cache at full core speed versus the half speed.

In raw performance these two improvements should add an increase of approximately 15 to 25% to Coppermine Pentium III CPUs versus current Pentium IIIs when running at identical MHz levels.

In entertainment applications such as 3D accelerated games, the benefits of the Coppermine's improvements will translate to approximately 5 - 10% depending on how new the application is. The newer the app, the better it likely will have been coded by the developer to take advantage of the higher-end functions of both the Coppermine P3s and the Athlon CPUs from AMD. Expect larger speed benefits to appear in applications that begin appearing in early 2000.

When Coppermine Pentium IIIs debut in October, they will debut in a variety of MHz levels and price points according to publications that have disclosed the information, likely in the following five versions:

 

P3-500/100 P3-533/133 P3-550/100

P3-600/133 P3-667/133

You'll notice there are two CPUs in that list that are based on Coppermine technology yet operate at a 100MHz front side bus. This is due to the fact that Intel has sold far more 440BX based mainboards than they expected over the past 120 days and they're not anxious to force these consumers, particularly in the corporate arena, to abandon the PCs they just bought.

This way, Intel can offer them CPUs that bring more performance than they currently have without a full system upgrade being necessary.

We've heard through the grapevine that Intel wants consumers to jump to i820 mainboards as quickly as possible and to that end they will not be charging a premium price for the new Coppermine CPUs when they debut versus the older .25 micron P3s that will continue to be sold at that time.

In our opinion that will make them good performance bargains at the time, but you'll need to purchase both the CPU and the i820 mainboard at the same time if you opt for a Coppermine P3 that runs at a bus speed of 133MHz, which we'd recommend