The Pentium III 933MHz is manufactured using Intel's .18 micron six metal layer process. It uses a fluorine-doped SiO2 (SiOF) dielectric for 15% reduced capacitance. This allows its 106mm square die to pack 28-million transistors into a die 4mm square larger than the Athlon's. Spacing changes were made to extend the life of aluminum as an interconnect material and push off the transition to copper. According to Intel, copper interconnects are not yet a mature technology, may reduce yields and have not been proven to be worth the trouble over aluminium at current processor speeds. Notched poly profiles are used to cut .13 micron gates to .10 micron size, thereby increasing switching speed, and Intel's SSE and MMX instruction sets are fully supported.
Those are the details for what is essentially the original Coppermine CPU running at 933MHz. With the Pentium III Coppermine, Intel set out to make a CPU line that could scale well to higher clock speeds, and apparently they succeeded.
But we know what you really want is the benchmarks...
Test System #1
- Intel 667, 700, 750, 800, 866 and 933MHz Pentium III
- Intel VC820 i820 Motherboard
- Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra 175/183MHz
- 128MB PC800 RDRAM
- Western Digital Expert 18.1 DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
Test System #2
- Intel Pentium III 1GHz
- Intel Vancouver 820 motherboard with BIOS 86A.0022.P08
- 128 MB RDRAM non-ECC. (assume PC-800)
- Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra 175/183MHz
- NVIDIA driver V.4.12.01.0377 .
- Maxtor 54098U8 hard disk
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DX 7.0 installed.
Test System #3
- AMD 900, 950MMHz and 1GHz Athlon
- ASUS 7VX KX133 Motherboard
- Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra 175/183MHz
- 128MB VC133 Memory
- IBM Deskstar 34GB DMA/66
- Integrated Sound (Vibra 16)
- Allied Telesyn AT2700TX
Test System #4
- AMD 650, 700, 750, 800, and 850MHz Athlon
- Gigabyte GA-7IX AMD 751 Motherboard
- Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra 175/183MHz
- 128MB HSDRAM Memory
- Western Digital Expert 18.1GB DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
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