Intel Pentium III Coppermine

Historia

The second Pentium III version, Coppermine, had an integrated full-speed 256 KB L2 cache with lower latency, which improved performance over Katmai. Under competitive pressure from AMDs Athlon processor, Intel also re-worked the chip internally, and finally fixed the well known instruction pipeline stalls. The result was a remarkable 30% increase in instruction processing performance. It was built on a 0.18 m process. Pentium III Coppermines running at 500, 533, 550, 600, 650, 667, 700, and 733 MHz were first released on October 25, 1999. From December 1999 to May 2000, Intel released Pentium IIIs running at speeds of 750, 800, 850, 866, 900, 933 and 1000 MHz (1GHz). A 1.13GHz version was released in mid-2000, but famously recalled after a popular hardware review website proved it was not stable enough to compile the Linux kernel. The problem was traced to the integrated cache, which simply could not operate at speeds above 1GHz. Intel needed at least six months to resolve this problem and released 1.1 and 1.13 GHz versions in 2001.