Elmer,
Found this @ EBNEWS site: ebnews.com
Intel, Motorola share desktop-processor limelight at MPU Forum
By Mark Hachman - Electronic Buyers' News
(10/06/99, 09:38:56 AM EDT)
----Excerpts ----
San Jose -- With uncertainty shrouding the fates of Centaur Technology, Rise Technology Co., and Cyrix Corp., only Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. were left to square off with new products in the desktop portion of the Microprocessor Forum here.
Intel described the technical details surrounding its new Coppermine microprocessor, ...
According to customers, Intel's Coppermine is scheduled to launch Oct. 25; the company has said only that its first products will launch at 700-MHz later this month. The new chip is defined as a Pentium III microprocessor with 256 Kbytes of on-die cache and requires 28 million transistors, or 106 sq. mm of die area. As Intel has done for some versions of the Pentium II, the chip has been designed for both mobile and desktop PCs. However, the Coppermine family will also be the first to include Intel's new Geyserville technology, which scales battery consumption down by half while maintaining 80% of the performance, the company said. Geyserville will be marketed as "SpeedStep" to OEMs.
According to Jim Wilson, product architecture manager for Intel, two areas were emphasized when the Coppermine was designed: an integrated "advanced transfer cache," and system buffering to minimize any resultant latencies.
"It's important to note that this isn't a bolt-on cache; we wanted to eliminate the inefficiencies in this particular interface," Wilson said. --( comment: Is it PB?)
The 288-bit-wide cache is 4-way set-associative, with a 32-byte line. At 700 MHz, the cache passes 11.2 Gbytes per second. In the real world, the cache will cut latency by four times compared to the latest Pentium III, he said. In other tests, the cache boosted performance 48.7% in optimized memory prefetches and 23% when used with a 3D kernel, Wilson said.
Despite the throughput improvement, analyst Keith Diefendorff of MPU Forum sponsor MicroDesign Resources, Sebastopol, Calif., noted that still, megahertz still matters.
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