By Dan Jones
Intel Corp can once again claim to be king of the hill in desktop processor land with the launch of 800MHZ and 750MHz Pentium III CPUs today. The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker has overtaken Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s 750MHz Athlon processor in the clock speed war between the two companies.
Intel spokesperson George Alfs said that Intel had been able to make the move earlier than expected because of Intel’s success in transitioning to the 0.18 micron manufacturing process. He denied suggestions that the move was a reaction to increasing competition from AMD in pushing up the clock speed of its chips.
The 800MHz chip will be available with either a 133MHz frontside bus – to take advantage of Intel’s 820 Rambus DRAM chipset – or a standard 100MHz FSB. The 750MHz chip will only be available with a 100MHz FSB. The chips will use a slot one connection to the motherboard. Alfs expects that the 800MHz chip will initially be used in enthusiast PCs for applications such as gaming. The 750MHz part is the chip being aimed at the general purpose market. Partly, this is because the 750MHz Pentium III will initially be available in greater volume, with the 800MHz CPU ramping up over the first quarter of next year.
The 800MHz chip is another big step on the road to a 1GHz (1,000MHz) desktop processor. Intel will talk about the feasibility of producing a 1GHz Pentium III using its existing ‘coppermine’ design at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February. Alfs wouldn’t be drawn on whether Intel would do this but said, it’s very evident to us that the 0.18 micron Pentium III has a lot of headroom left.
The 800MHz Pentium III is available now, priced at $851 each in 1,000 unit quantities. The 750MHz chip is priced at $803 each in 1,000 unit quantities.
