The Intel Coppermine 850Mhz CPU

Tuesday, May 16, 2000


The features

Now that we've rattled of the names of the entire Intel Pentium III family, it's time to look at the Intel Coppermine 850MHz itself.

First off, as you can attest to using the chart on the previous page, 850MHz Coppermines are available in a Slot 1, or PGA370 configuration. Do note, however, that the 850MHz chips are available only with a 100MHz bus configuration.

Speaking of the Coppermine's name though, it must be pointed out that there isn't a speck of copper used in the production of these oddly named chips. In fact, this chip's nom-de-plume was chosen by the name of a river in Oregon state where the CPU's designers developed it. Intel chips with copper interconnects (wiring), will actually not appear on the market until a 0.13micron process is adopted later this year.

The following features characterize both the 850MHz Coppermine, as well as the rest of the Coppermine family:


Dual Independent Bus (DIB)

The "Dual Independent Bus (DIB)" consists of placing the L2 cache on an independent, dedicated bus, which serves to optimize memory transfers.



Non-Blocking Level 1 Cache

This feature consists of two 16KB L1 caches; one for storing data, the other for the instructions.



256 KB, Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache

ATC (Advanced Transfer Cache) L2 cache signifies the fact that the L2 cache is integrated on-die of the processor itself, and runs at the same speed as the CPU. The ATC L2 has the following features:

  • Non-Blocking, full-speed, and integrated on the processor die
  • 8-way associative
  • 256-bit wide data bus
  • Reduced latency when compared with conventional cache


    Non-Blocking Level 2 Cache

    Certain versions of the Pentium III have an external L2 cache mounted on the motherboard itself. With the Coppermine family, this cache consists of 512KB of non-blocking on-die memory which provides better memory performance relative to an L2 cache mounted on the motherboard itself. By integrating this cache within the processor, it is possible to reduce access time, thus allowing faster access to recently used instructions, and data. The on-die cache also uses a dedicated 64-bit bus.



    Advanced System Buffering

    "Advanced System Buffering" is an optimization of the bus system's buffers, and of the queue's wait order, which results in more efficient use of the bandwidth available on 100MHz, and 133MHz busses. This feature is composed of:

  • 4 writeback buffers
  • 6 fill buffers
  • 8 bus queue entries


    Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions

    Internet Streaming SIMD Instructions consists of a collection of 70 instructions. This includes instructions for performing calculation using floating-point data, instructions dealing with integer SIMD values, and cache control instructions. A few benefits of these instructions are:

  • Better manipulation of high quality images, at higher resolutions than was previously possible

  • Higher quality sound, and encoding/decoding of MPEG2.

  • Substantial reduction of CPU usage for tasks such as voice recognition, as well as an increase in efficiency, and the quality of such tasks.

    Intel Processor Serial Number

    The serial number of Intel processors allows for Intel products to be identified, permitting faster identification and management of equipments.



    Next: The tests