Intel Turns Up The Heat : Pentium III shifts focus from price to performance

Electronic News, Feb 22, 1999 by Robert Ristelhueber

San Jose - Intel is back on the offensive. After battering the competition with price cuts in response to pressure at the low end of the PC markets, the Santa Clara-based giant turned its sights on the high end of the market with a battle plan based on performance leadership and a new family of Pentiums that is expected to rev up to over 600MHz by the end of the year.

Intel last week demonstrated the resources at its disposal with a lavish preview of Pentium III, filling the sprawling San Jose Convention Center with scores of hardware and software vendors demonstrating their P3 wares. Intel said it would spend $300 million to promote the new chips in some 60 countries.

The first PCs employing P3, with clock speeds of 450 and 500MHz, will go on sale this week, and 550MHz versions will follow in the second quarter. But these chips, built on a 0.25-micron process, will quickly be converted to a 0.18-micron process in order to provide a substantial speed boost in the second half of the year.

Although it was drowned out by Intel's publicity barrage, Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated that it wouldn't surrender the field to its much larger rival. Introducing its K6-III processor,

AMD said it is shipping a 400MHz version of the device in volume, and has begun sampling a 450MHz edition. Compaq Computer is among the PC vendors that will ship K6-III systems, the company promised.

But keeping up with Intel's relentless progress in process technology will not prove easy for AMD. Intel president Craig Barrett hammered at the performance issue during last week's event, claiming that the power of Pentium III can provide the full experience the PC user desires. "Enriching the end-user experience by bringing rich content over the Internet" is the mission of P3, he told the audience. "We're really looking for this to be a major change in the way we all do our business."

Continuing that theme, Mike Aymar, corporate vice president, said the P3 would enable real-time rendering of images, on-the-fly data compression/decompression, and practical voice recognition. "We're able to get to the point where we can use a fairly thin data pipe like a standard analog phone line and still deliver a very rich video and graphic experience," he added.

Aymar said the P3 would run "well above 600MHz" when Intel converted it to the 0.18-micron process in the second half, but said a 800MHz rate was probably not in the cards this year. Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Business group, said that "certainly the large majority" of P3s shipped at the end of the year will be on the 0.18- micron process.

Pentium III is a tweak, not an architectural leap. Intel added 70 new instructions to improve functions such as 3D graphics, where it has lagged AMD's 3Dnow technology. It also improved both the floating point and the way the cache works internally.

For its part, AMD has come up with TriLevel Cache to boost the performance of its new family. It consists of a 256KB L2 write-back cache operating at the full speed of the processor, complementing the standard 64KB L1 cache. It added a multiport internal cache design, enabling simultaneous 64-bit reads and writes to both the L1 and L2 caches. Finally, AMD added a 100MHz frontside bus to the external cache, which can serve as a scalable Level 3 cache on the motherboard.

The K6-III is positioned against the Pentium III, not the Pentium II, said Michael Steele, division marketing manager for the Computation Products group. "We're targeting the business power user plus the home market that uses performance PCs."

Although the P3 appears to have a performance advantage over K6-III in raw megahertz, Steele claimed that his chip has design advantages, including TriLevel, that will negate that difference. "I expect you'll see a better level of performance over P3 at comparable speeds."

The 400MHz K6-III is priced at $284, while the 450MHz part is priced at $476. Intel has yet to announce pricing on its parts. Steele said, however, that AMD may discontinue its policy of undercutting Intel's pricing by 25 percent. "Our price will be very competitive, but I wouldn't look for it to be 25 percent less," he said. "The K6- III/450 performs faster than a Pentium III 500," he added as a reason for narrowing the price discount.

While he couldn't match Intel's lineup of PC makers that have committed to P3, which included Dell, Compaq, Toshiba, Micron and others, Steele said Compaq would use the K6-III, and other names would follow soon.