Friday, June 23, 2000

Introduction

The war between AMD and Intel has been raging for the last few months, as both parties of unleashed a flood of new processors on the marketplace. AMD first launched Athlons at 800Mhz, 850Mhz, 900Mhz, 950Mhz, and 1Ghz, to which Intel responded by releasing 800Mhz, 800EB, 850Mhz, 866Mhz, 933Mhz, and 1Ghz Pentiums. When, and if this race up the MHz hill will ever finish, nobody knows. Everyone can be certain though, that no matter what the outcome, consumers will be the ultimate winners as the two competitors push their products to new heights of performance.

The Intel Pentium III Coppermine 933Mhz Processor.

Nothing, save for its higher operating frequency and Vcore voltage, really distinguishes the 933MHz Coppermine from its siblings. The 933MHz's Vcore is set to 1.70V, compared to the 1.65V of previous Coppermines. That sums up the differences between the 933MHz part, and its predecessors, as the former benefits from all the features of the latter, including ATC & ASB - two terms that may not ring a bell, but are nonetheless important factors in the chip's performance. What follows then, are definitions of these new terms, and what they mean to you, the user.:

ATC (Advanced Transfer Cache)

The ATC L2 cache is a block of memory that is integrated into the very body of the CPU itself, and that operates at the same frequency as the processor core. The ATC has the following distinguishing features:

Integrating the L2 cache into the processor die reduces memory access time by providing a nearby, high-speed path for data & instructions that have been recently used. The integrated cache also permits 64-bit dedicated accesses.

ASB (Advanced System Buffering)

The "Advanced System Buffering" feature represents optimizations made to the system bus buffers, and to the wait order queue that have resulted in an overall increase in the efficiency with which the available bandwidth of 100MHz & 133MHz busses is used. This feature includes:

For an explanation of the Coppermine's other features (save for the voltage and frequency), we recommend reading our PIII 850Mhz analysis, as its feature set is otherwise identical to that of the PIII 933MHz. To be brief, the Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz is manufactured on a 0.18 micron process, has 256KB of integrated L2 cache, works with a Vcore of 1.70V, and includes roughly 30 million transistors.

Next: The tests results