From the same people that brought you the AMD Athlon 1GHz review earlier this week on Monday comes an Intel Pentium III 1GHz review (we've wiped off any residue of coffee stains and given this review a clean bill of health). Whilst the aforementioned chip manufacturers need only slap each other senseless with press releases proclaiming "ours is bigger than yours", end users that swear by owning the fastest CPU on the block have to make do with skews that seem to propel further forward than the Cambridge University Rowing team.

As nonsensical as the current state of affairs is, now probably isn't the time nor the place to state the obvious and thus we promise not to mention the so-called "MHz war" for a while (at least until the Willamette vs. Mustang). I mean how much more exciting can the hardware world really get? Two x86 CPUs released in the space of three days and both running at frequencies that seemed so far away only 18 months ago on a Pentium II 300MHz.

Because you've heard it so many times before, we're only going to give a brief summary of the features of the Coppermine based Pentium III 1GHz before we hit the benchmarks, but don't skip ahead! We've added several tasty recent discoveries to the mix for you to chew on.

The Pentium III 1GHz is manufactured using Intel's .18 micron six metal layer process. It uses a fluorine-doped SiO2 (SiOF) dielectric for reduced capacitance. Its 106mm^2 die, 4mm^2 larger than the AMD Athlon 1GHz, packs in 28-million transistors. It runs at 1.7V and dissipates 33W of power, which compares to 1.8V and 60W of power for the AMD Athlon 1GHz. This does give Pentium III 1GHz purchasers a bit more breathing room when they're considering what power supply to buy, but we still recommend you get a 300W power supply either way. The Slot 1 Pentium III 1GHz uses a 133MHz system bus with a 7.5x multiplier and supports Intel's SSE and MMX instruction sets.