700Mhz Shoot-Out: Intel Comes Out Swinging
By Loyd Case

It no doubt has been quite frustrating to be an Intel employee, watching AMD slowly ratchet up the clock-rate game. Here's plucky AMD, getting all the attention from the computer press. First, it ships the 600MHz Athlon, which easily outpaced the 600MHz Pentium III in most benchmark tests, both synthetic and application based. Then came the 650MHz Athlon, which opened the gap even more. And just recently, AMD announced the 700MHz Athlon, driving Intel deeper into despair. About the only bleak part of this picture for AMD has been the relative dearth of Slot-A motherboards for the upgrade market.

For a while, it looked like Intel was retreating - when in reality, the world's largest chip company was just falling back and regrouping. Now Intel is launching a two-pronged counterattack: one prong aimed right at AMD's weak spot, core-logic chipsets for motherboards, the other aimed right at AMD's key strength, the Athlon CPU.

The core-logic attack was actually supposed to have come last month with the launch of the Intel 820 chipset (code-named Camino). But Intel ran into some snags with the implementation of the new RAMBUS memory on the Camino chipset and thus pushed back its launch. Now it looks like the 820 will be out in late November or early December. The fiasco was embarrassing for Intel due to the last-minute nature of the delay, but it's only a temporary setback.

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The Athlon's innards
The second prong of Intel's attack is the launch of the new Coppermine processor line. Although there was some initial speculation as to its final name, the Coppermine CPU will still be called Pentium III. There are two key differences between Coppermine and past Pentium IIIs:
  • There's now 256KB of on-chip L2 cache. In the old Pentium IIIs the L2 cache wasn't part of the chip but was integrated onto a printed circuit board inside the Slot-1 cartridge. In addition, Intel spent a lot of time tuning the caching algorithms of the Coppermine for greater efficiency.
  • The new CPU is built with Intel's 0.18 micron manufacturing process. This enables the new breed of Pentium III to run at a higher clock rate and lower voltage, and it generates less heat. The actual die size of the new Coppermine is smaller than the old Pentium III (0.25 micron), despite having a far larger transistor count due to the onboard L2 cache.

Testing the Juggernauts