An Outlook Into The Closer Future
There is is hardly any doubt that Intel made it again. Pentium III may not be exiting, but with the SSE-optimized software that is available now and with upcoming titles like e.g. Quake Arena it only takes a decent amount of Intel-marketing and the Pentium III will be a success. Intel has got a big and pretty powerful department that is pushing software developers into using SSE, so that we can expect a lot of SEE-optimized software this year. Pentium III as it is right now will probably not exist for a long time. The introduction of 'Dixon' to the mobile market proves that Intel is ready to go with 256kB on-die L2-cache. 'Dixon' is a Pentium II core with 256kB on-die cache and thus very similar to Celeron's 'Mendocino'-core, which has only got 128kB on-die L2-cache. The next CPU on Intel's roadmap has the code name 'Coppermine'. This CPU is Pentium III with 256kB on-die L2-cache, so the only difference to 'Dixon' is the additional SSE-instruction unit. It is not very hard to imagine that Intel has already got several 'Coppermine'-cores up and running, the couple of million transistors more that Coppermine needs over Dixon will hardly be a problem to Intel. Thus we can expect 'Coppermine' anytime soon, or rather any time that Intel feels like releasing it. Coppermine does not require any external chips anymore, which makes it possible that it will also be available for a new kind of socket rather than only for Slot1.
AMD will have to go through a hard time until the release of K7. The K6-3 is not that much of a great product as many of us were hoping for. Office performance alone doesn't really amaze any of us anymore, the 3D-performance is at least as important. As long as Celeron runs 3D-games and even high-end applications faster than K6-3, AMD can hardly ask for a higher price than what Intel takes for Celeron. This puts AMD into a horrible situation. K6-3 will be significantly more expensive to produce than K6-2, it has more than double the amount of transistors, but K6-3 can not possibly be any more expensive than K6-2 if anyone is supposed to buy it. Celeron's low pricing is a serious threat to K6-3 sales so that it's very questionable if AMD will make any profit until the release of K7. K7 will most likely have to face 'Coppermine' rather than Pentium III's current 'Katmai'-core, so that even this promising processor will have a very hard time at its release date mid 1999.
