Pentium III will boost multimedia functionality.

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Question: Tell me about the Pentium III chip. When is it due out? Is it worth waiting for, and paying for? I made up a dream machine with two 13.5 hard drives (I figure I could back up onto the second one) and an extra SCSI controller, plus a Sony professional monitor. Any suggestions? Help – should I get it now, or wait? What is the difference between hard drives – what is the 7200 speed stuff? And what about SDRAM versus SDRAM with ECC (what is ECC?) and how does any of this RAM compare to EDO? – Lee

Answer: Not much has been released about the Pentium III chip, although a trickle of information has just started to come from Intel. That trickle will turn into a multimedia marketing deluge by the spring.

I did pull some factoids together that should be of interest.

  • The new Pentium III chip, code-named Katmai, is based on the Pentium II architecture with 70 new chip instructions which will boost multimedia functionality. Think of it as MMX on growth hormones. MMX was a set of new multimedia instructions that was introduced to the Pentium chip to accelerate video and audio functions. It was later added to the Pentium Pro to create the Pentium II.
  • Intel says the Pentium III chip will be available sometime in March with the introduction of a 450 MHz chip. By the end of the year a 500 MHz and 600Mhz configuration will be available.
  • Pricing is expected to about $750 to $800 per chip, dropping to $300 per chip by the fall, analyst Ashok Kumar of U.S. investment firm Piper Jaffray told tech news website CNET.
    Given the expected price drop, I’d wait to buy the PIII chip. When buying a computer, I always use the TechnologyTips “Second Best” rule: When buying a new computer, purchase the second best chip technology on the market. There are two benefits to this: You’ll pay lower prices for technology that has already been paid for by early adopters, and you’ll also be confident in the knowledge that the product is proven in the marketplace and therefore is not likely to be subjected to recalls. Remember how the early Pentium chips overheated? If you’re keen on the Pentium III chip, wait for the 600 MHz version to come out, and then buy the 500 MHz chip.
  • The new chip will also come with a 133-MHz system bus in the second half of the year. The system bus controls the flow of data across the computer’s “nervous system” and more specifically between the processor and main memory. The faster the system bus, the better the system’s performance. Pentium II chips use a 100-MHz system bus.

On to your next question. SDRAM is short for Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory. It is memory that can run at much higher clock-speeds than conventional memory. MMX synchronizes with the system bus and is capable of running at 100MHz. That’s three times faster than conventional FPM RAM (found on 486 and early Pentium machines) and about twice as fast as EDO RAM, which was the RAM technology of choice up until SDRAM came out about a year or so ago.

Here’s another fun fact: Thanks to the synchronicity of SDRAM with the CPU bus, the processor can access memory about 25 per cent faster than EDO memory. For more SDRAM facts, there’s a good page at http://www.pcguide.com/ref/ram/tech_SDRAM.htm.

ECC is short for Error Correcting Code. It is a type of memory that includes special circuitry for testing the accuracy of data as it zips in and out of memory.

As for hard disks, they have a rotation speed varying 4,500 rpm to 10,000 rpm drive. The bigger the number, the faster the rotation, and the higher the data transfer rate. The faster drives are also louder and hotter, says Tom Pabst on Tom’s Hardware page at http://www.tomshardware.com. He also suggests you may need to cool a 7200 rpm disk with an extra fan, or its life will be much shorter. There are lots of good hard drive resources at http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/h/hard_disk_drive.html.