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133 MHz Front Side Bus.One of the features being introduced with the "Coppermine" is the 133 MHz Front Side Bus. This though is not a feature of all "Coppermine" processors but is featured with the 600,667 and 733 MHz variants. The 133 MHz Bus brings the advantage of increased bandwidth between the CPU and main memory sub-system, rising from 680 MB/s with the 100 MHz bus to 1000 MB/s on the 133 Mhz bus. This gives the Pentium III extra headroom with memory bandwidth as speeds rise towards the 1 GHz mark. There must though be a note of caution here as the main rival to the "Coppermine", AMD's Athlon can boast a 200 MHz bus with it's EV6 protocol and thus gives it more headroom. The 133 MHz bus also allows Intel to lower the clock multipliers needed in order to achieve the high running speeds that are becoming the norm. This means that a "Coppermine" running at 733 MHz only needs a multiplier of 5.5x (133 MHz bus) compared to the 6.5x needed by the 650 MHz chip (100 Mhz bus). At the moment we are seeing a transition from the 100 MHz bus to the 133 MHz bus for Intel's leading desktop processor. This we feel is probably due to the delay in the new i820 chipset which is designed for "Coppermine" and takes advantage of the 133 MHz Front Side Bus. When the 133 MHz bus becomes more commonplace, it is unlikely that there will be further introductions of 100 MHz bus chips. Performance.The issue of performance is critical for "Coppermine" and for Intel as it attempts to re-claim it's crown of fastest x86 processor which was lost to the AMD Athlon in August. The issue of performance needs to be broken into integer and floating point performance so that "Coppermine" can be compared to it's predecessor "Katmai" and it's rival, AMD's Athlon. Integer Performance.This is the area in which the "Coppermine" clearly manages to put clear blue water between itself and it's predecessor "Katmai". The effect of the on-chip Level 2 cache, running at clock speed greatly boosts integer performance. Benchmark scores at Ace's Hardware and Tom's Hardware show this. The "Coppermine" is even able to outperform AMD's Athlon in integer performance by a small degree, but this is much less than what it holds over "Katmai". For integer performance, Intel's "Coppermine" does indeed manage to win back the crown of fastest x86 processor, albeit by a very small margin. Floating Point Performance.Traditionally floating point performance has always been the area in which Intel has been able to beat the opposition into submission. Alas, for Intel, this has no longer been the case since AMD released the Athlon processor with it's 3 issue (superscalar?), pipelined floating point unit (FPU). The FPU of the "Coppermine" has seen no major enhancements over that of the "Katmai" and scales in a very similar manner. Unfortunately for Intel this means that the "Coppermine" comes a very clear second to AMD's Athlon in this important measure. According to benchmarks over at Tom's Hardware a 733 MHz "Coppermine" can only better the FPU performance of a 550 MHz Athlon in the 3D StudioMAX benchmark.
That is not to say the FPU performance of the "Coppermine" is bad, it just shows that the 4 year old design of the P6 core has at last
been bettered by AMD's Athlon.
Other Intel Processors at:
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