HOT! An Early Look At The New Pentium III (Tualatin or Coppermine-T?) – THG.RU

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Oopsa!

Intel’s new Pentium III baby and its big brother ‘Coppermine’

As proper computer hardware reviewers we are nowadays used to receive upcoming processors fresh from the manufacturer, excited about the opportunity to run early tests, but instantly tied to those infamous NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) that shut us up for the time being. We were more than surprised when we suddenly found a bundle with a crying Pentium III 1.13 of new design lying in front of our doorstep. Of course we wouldn’t let this CPU suffer out in the cold, far from its mum in Satan Clara! So we took it in, put it in a warm and comfy motherboard and gave it the 1.5 V core voltage it asked for to still its power hunger.

Tualatin Or Coppermine-T?

The front view shows that Intel has learned and is now saving the delicate core of the new Pentium III generation.

Now since the little processor-baby wasn’t deliberately sent by his mum with the usual introduction letter, we are not so sure how we have to call it. Is it ‘Tualatin’ or ‘Coppermine-T’? Does its heart beat according to a 0.13 or 0.18 micron process? Does it make any difference anyway? We don’t know if our little fellow is a ‘Tualatin’ or a ‘Coppermine-T’, but we do know that our baby comes with only 256 kB of second level cache, which is just as much as its numerous brothers and sisters out there, that used to be the common members of the Pentium III family (Coppermine-tribe). It told us that some of its brothers and sister have 512 kB L2-cache, which might make them a bit stronger with certain software. Unfortunately, those siblings of our little toddler haven’t found their way to our lab yet. It will only be a question of time …

While both guys fit in Socket370, the new Tualatin/Coppermine-T has still a slightly different backside.

When?

Mike Magee has just reported that it will take quite a bit longer than expected until Daddy Craig will release the little ‘Tualatins’ out to the performance-hungry Pentium III fans. Many of us are wondering why, and what the fuss with the next Pentium III is about anyway. For the majority of performance freaks the Pentium III is slowly disappearing already. Behold! As much as Pentium 4 might be hyped and marketed, the majority of processor sales is still dominated by Pentium III and once this processor comes at higher clock speeds, it can easily threaten the miraculous Pentium 4. Maybe Intel itself is surprised to see how well Tualatin actually scales and runs.

The Platform – MSI’s 815 EPT Pro Motherboard

There is – of course – a downside to the new Pentium III processor as well. It may have the same socket (Socket370) as the good old Coppermine, but it requires a different I/O-voltage and thus a different chipset. Right now, you need a new version of Intel’s 815 chipset (i815 EP B-stepping) to run the new PIII. Current PIII-boards won’t be able to host the new breed.

We were using MSI’s brand-new 815 EPT Pro motherboard, which was able to accommodate our new found little processor just fine. The voltage required by our processor toddler was a mere 1.5 V and since it was an engineering sample, the multiplier could be altered, though only to less than the x8.5 that are required for 1.13 GHz (at 133 MHz FSB). When we raised the multiplier to anything higher than x8.5 (which is absolutely possible with MSI’s 815 EPT Pro), we always ended up running the little fellow at 533 MHz. This forced us to use tough overclocking measures, so that we tortured our little Tualatin or Coppermine-T at 166 MHz FSB and memory clock to reach an impressive 1419.88 MHz core clock.

MSI’s 815 EPT Pro proved a highly stable platform, which allowed the 166 MHz FSB-overclocking without a glitch. The processor core voltage was raised to 1.6 V and the PC150 memory was adjusted to a 3-3-3-7/9 setting to ensure reliable operation. It gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling when I was finally able to witness a Pentium III finishing BAPCo’s Sysmark at a core clock way higher than the previous ‘Coppermine-limit’ of 1066 MHz. I had not been as lucky with Intel’s first Pentium 1.13 GHz processor last year that Intel finally retracted. Now it’s time to congratulate Intel for finally managing this speed and I won’t go on too much about the fact that it ‘only’ took some 10 months to make its promise come true.

Future Pentium III Also With 512 kB Second Level Cache

As faithful, though not always believing, readers of Mike Magee’s TheInquirer, we are fully aware of the fact that a fellow Taiwanese hardware website that publishes in traditional Chinese spelling (BIG5) has got its hands on a Pentium III 1.13 GHz with 512 kB second-level cache. This is a clear sign that Intel will have two different versions of new-age Pentium III’s, once it decides to bless the public with these processors. We would like to express our disappointment that our baby-processor is only equipped with the traditional 256 kB L2-cache. We’ll try to grow a bit more L2-cache, but it will take a while and a lot of TLC.

Technical Specs?

We have not been briefed by Intel about the exact innards of our little processor discovery, so we can’t give you a technology rundown on it as well. You will see however, that its performance is only slightly better than that of a Coppermine at the same core clock, which suggests that Tualatin/Coppermine-T received only minor architectural modifications.

Benchmark Setup

Benchmark Results

Please forgive me that I had to stick to a small amount of benchmarking, simply due to the urgency of the matter. I considered it my responsibility to be the first that reports of a Pentium III processor, which is for once capable of running Sysmark reliably at a speed of 1.13 GHz and beyond.

Quake 3 Arena – Windows 98 SE

You can see that the Tualatin-256 is not a whole lot faster than Coppermine when both run at 1 GHz. However, once overclocked to 1.42 GHz, the Tualatin-256 (as we christened it) is able to reach regions that are usually reserved for Athlon and Pentium 4 processors only.

The same as the above said is valid for the infamous NV15-demo run as well. A tuned Tualatin-256 is able to get close to today’s high-end processors.

Dronez

In Dronez the new Socket370 processor is not quite able to touch its fancier competitors. It would be very interesting to find out why.

Sandra 2001

Here are the results of the new kid on the block under Sandra 2001. You can see in the CPU-integer results that the new processor comes indeed with slightly improved performance over Coppermine. We are sorry to tell you that we are not aware what architectural change is responsible for this effect. The overclocked Tualatin-256 is able to beat the whole competition in raw integer performance. Be reminded however, that this result is not reflected in the real-world benchmarks we ran.

The multimedia performance of Tualatin-256 is identical to Coppermine. Once running at 1.4 GHz, it is able to beat the whole rest.

BAPCo Sysmark 2001 – Windows 98

The overall Sysmark 2001 results show that Tualatin-256 is definitely competitive in office or content creation software. The overclocked Tualatin-256 1.4 GHz is on par with the illustrious competition from AMD and Intel.

At a good clock speed, Tualatin-256 is better than Athlon and slightly behind Pentium 4 1.7 GHz.

This result has to be very painful to Intel’s Pentium 4 freaks. You can see that the 1.4 GHz Tualatin-256 processor beats Pentium 4 1.7 GHz and threatens Athlon 1333.

Conclusion

Sometimes Intel takes a bit longer … In the last ten months it became very quiet around Pentium III for desktop systems, because Intel had to realize that it was impossible to squeeze more than 1 GHz out of the Coppermine design. Many people think that Pentium III has lost its future already, and who could blame them?

Now it seems as if Intel has either got trouble with its 0.13-micron process or it had one of its ingenious fits. The new Pentium III that we just introduced to you is not supposed to appear on the shelves anytime soon. The same is valid for ‘Northwood’, the upcoming 0.13-micron Socket478-version of Pentium 4, which is already running at 2+ GHz in all the test labs of motherboard makers. Overly smart marketing or manufacturing problems may be the reason for Intel’s weird decision – we will probably never know. What we do know however is that the new Pentium III version could indeed have a strong influence on the prolongation of Pentium III’s life span.

I don’t have any doubts that its new design and process technology could enable Pentium III processors at clock speeds that put Pentium 4 to shame in a significant number of benchmarks. Intel doesn’t want to jeopardize Pentium 4’s sluggish and stony route to success, neither does it want to impact the already low sales of RDRAM. However, if the new Pentium III won’t be released soon, the public won’t even remember this processor anymore. I doubt that Intel realizes the consequences. The people who would buy faster Pentium III processors hands down today, will rather go for Athlon-platforms than wait for the release of Tualatin or – even less likely – buy a Pentium 4 system.