All of us remember pretty well what was happening in the microprocessor market in the beginning of March. The major rivals struggling for the leadership in the x86 CPU market sector chose that particular time to show off while surpassing 1 GHz barrier. At that time AMD turned out the luckiest of all and on 6 March this company appeared the first to step beyond this limit having forced Intel to strike back. When Intel found itself lagging behind its major competitor, they decided not to disgrace themselves and a couple of days later, on 8 March, they announced their gigahertz processor on the Coppermine core. However, this was far not a voluntary move and Pentium III 1GHz didn't appear in retail while the intermediate processors working at 800-933MHz remained unannounced at all. Moreover, Pentium III 1GHz acquired a purely declarative character, because it is still unavailable for shoppers.

So, finally, on 24 May Intel approached 1GHz limit with a two and a half months tardiness though. This time it was bare truth, no speculations. It was on that particular day that the world met 1GHz Pentium III's logical predecessor - Intel Pentium III 933MHz. This time it was not just a symbolic occasion. The CPU appeared on shop shelves. And now we should calmly wait for the 1GHz Pentium III to appear in retail as well. As to Intel, this event is scheduled for Q3 (for September, to be more precise).

And then in Q4 we will be able to see Willamette working at 1.3/1.4GHz and maybe even a Pentium III supporting over 1GHz, that depends on Intel's mood. In the meanwhile we got the chance to test the eldest model of all currently available- Intel Pentium III 933. Here is a brief list of its major features.

• Coppermine core made with 0.18 micron technology and 29 million transistors
• 933MHz working frequency, 7x frequency multiplier
• 32KB L1 cache (16KB for data and 16KB for instructions)
• 256KB L2 integrated on-die cache working at the full core frequency (256bit Advanced Transfer Cache)
• Advanced System Buffering
• Set of SIMD-instructions and unique serial number
• Available as 370-pin FC-PGA Socket370 CPU interface and 242-pin Slot 1 CPU interface
• GTL+ system bus working at 133MHz
• 1.65V core voltage for FC-PGA version and 1.7V for Slot 1

So, as you can see from the specification, the new Intel Pentium III is none other but an ordinary CPU on Coppermine core, which has already been the center of our attention several times. Take for instance, Intel Pentium III 500E FC-PGA or Intel Pentium III 600E and 600EB.

We won't repeat once again the details about the Advanced Transfer Cache with a 256bit core path and Advanced System Buffering, which presence implies the increase of the processor bus buffers number and their size. Instead we would like to point out some differences, which serve to distinguish Intel Pentium III 933 from its predecessors.

Firstly, we should mention new processor stepping cB0, which is actually the same as by a GHz model. At first sight it doesn't promise any super advantages, however, if you take a closer look at it, you will be glad to find out that a 933MHz model with a new core stepping dissipated much less heat than even Intel Pentium III 800: only 24.5W in FC-PGA package and 25.5W in SECC2. But despite this, our tests proved very low overclocking potential of Pentium III 933MHz, which allows increasing the FSB frequency by only 4-5% at the most.

The second and a much more unpleasant factor is that Intel Pentium III 933 FC-PGA is supplied with a very large cooler. This large heatsink may cause a lot of problems when installing this CPU into a number of mainboards, such as Gigabyte 6VX7-4X, because their Socket370 is surrounded by a lot of capacitors, so that a cooler as large as that on Pentium III 933 doesn't fit.

And now let's discuss the results shown by Intel Pentium III 933. Our testing system was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium III 866 and 933MHz; AMD Athlon 850 and 900MHz CPU
• Chaintech 6ATA4 and ASUS K7V mainboards
• Creative 3DBlaster Annihilator Pro graphics card
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! sound card
• IBM DJNA 372200 HDD
• 128MB PC133 SDRAM by Micron
• MS Windows98 SE

As you can see, both mainboards we have chosen for our tests for Pentium III and for Athlon are based on VIA chipsets: Apollo Pro133A and KX133. Both of these chipsets use the same architectural solutions and differ only by the supported system bus type. We made this particular choice in order to make the testing results dependent on the CPU performance only and not on the core logic construction.

So, the tests. To begin with, we tested the performance of this novelty in office applications.

Content Creation Winstone 2000 uses a couple of 32bit applications loading the system quite heavily to measure the CPU performance. Among them we can list: Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5. These applications operate huge amounts of data and require high system and memory bus bandwidth in the first place. As a result, we can notice that Intel Pentium III 933 doesn't reach even the 850MHz AMD Athlon.

This test includes a bit different set of applications: CorelDRAW 9, Microsoft Excel 2000, Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4.0, Netscape Communicator 4.61, Corel Paradox 9, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft Word 2000, MetaCreations Bryce 4, Avid Elastic Reality 3.1, Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1, and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0. The data processed by these applications is not so enormous that is why L2 cache speed plays the determinative part. Of course, Intel Pentium III with an integrated L2 on-die cache working at the full processor frequency can easily leave AMD Athlon 900 and AMD Athlon 850 far behind, because their L2 cache is located outside the processor core and works at 1/3 or 2/5 the processor frequency correspondingly. Even a twice as large L2 cache of AMD Athlon doesn't help here. The results obtained give us every right to suppose that with the launching of AMD Thunderbird, which also features an on-die L2 cache, the situation with the performance will change and Intel will hardly have anything to respond to AMD CPUs' performance leadership. Only Willamette due in Q4 seems to be capable of changing the situation.

And now we are passing over to a bit more exciting thing: gaming tests.

In High Quality mode graphics card of the system appeared the main bottleneck. All the tested processors performed quite well and showed practically the same results.

It is much more interesting to look at Fast mode and the CPUs performance there. Since the processor operates less data in this case, L2 cache tells quite significantly on the performance and Intel Pentium III 933 manages to take the lead. However, against the background of the powerful arithmetic coprocessor of AMD Athlon Intel Pentium III seems a bit less tremendous.

The situation here reminds us of the previous case, where the influence of Pentium III Advanced Transfer Cache is pretty great. Again Intel Pentium III 933 proves the best.

The results are similar to the previous test.

Well, the outcome is quite predictable. The same things have happened in other gaming applications.

So, the gaming tests repeatedly show similar results. AMD Athlon, Intel Pentium III appear very close to each other when working at similar frequencies.

Conclusions

At present Intel Pentium III 933 is one of the fastest CPUs. It managed to achieve this impressive result due to the integrated on-die L2 cache working at the full CPU frequency. However, this makes us think that with the launching of Duron/Thunderbird, which will also feature on-die L2 cache, Intel won't be able to withstand their high performance. Intel's only hope in this case remains Willamette.

Unfortunately, a 933MHz newcomer proved not only one of the fastest but also one of the most expensive in the today's market. Pentium III 933 costs $744 in >1000 pieces supplies. That is why we have to admit that for now AMD Athlon remains the best solution regarding the price-to-performance ratio.