Conclusion
I have to congratulate Intel for finally getting the best out of the good old P6-design. Coppermine has got very close to Athlon, it even surpasses it due to SSE and other enhancements in several 3D-games, particularly in Quake3. Coppermine suffers a bit from the delay of i820, but it is still able to show its teeth already. What we shouldn't forget however is that there's a new platform for Athlon due soon as well, which should give this AMD CPU some speed boost too. For workstation users the answer should still be clear, Athlon is the way better choice due to its far superior floating point performance and it will get even more obvious once there are SMP-platforms available for Athlon. Office application users shouldn't look at those CPUs in the first place really, since every office application runs just fine on K6-2, K6-3 or Celeron platforms. The story has changed a bit for gamers. Coppermine is at least as fast as Athlon in games and until the world changes significantly, game developers will help out Intel by optimizing their games for SSE rather than putting any major effort into 3DNow!-enhancements. This is partly AMD's fault, since it would be their job to supply developers with a compiler that optimizes for Athlon. The final decision will be made when you look at the pricing though.
| Desktop | Bus Speed | 1000 unit volumepricing per chip |
|---|---|---|
| Pentium III-733 | 133 MHz | $776 |
| Pentium III-700 | 100 MHz | $754 |
| Pentium III-667 | 133 MHz | $605 |
| Pentium III-650 | 100 MHz | $583 |
| Pentium III-600EB | 133 MHz | $455 * |
| Pentium III-600E | 100 MHz | $455 |
| Pentium III-550E | 100 MHz | $368 (FCPGA package) |
| Pentium III-533EB | 133 MHz | $305 |
| Pentium III-500E | 100 MHz | $239 (FCPGA package) |
| Workstation/Server | Bus Speed | 1000 unit volumepricing per chip |
| Pentium III Xeon-733 w/256 kB L2-cache | 133 MHz | $826 |
| Pentium III Xeon-667 w/256 kB L2-cache | 133 MHz | $655 |
| Pentium III Xeon-600 w/256 kB L2-cache | 133 MHz | $505 |
| Mobile | Bus Speed | 1000 unit volumepricing per chip |
| Mobile Pentium III-500 | 100 MHz | $530 |
| Mobile Pentium III-450 | 100 MHz | $348 |
| Mobile Pentium III-400 | 100 MHz | $348 (low voltage) |
*E = to differentiate 0.18 micron from 0.25 micron processors at the same frequency
*B = to differentiate 133 MHz front side bus processors from 100 MHz front side bus processors at the same speed
This is the latest pricing of AMD's Athlon for comparison.
| Desktop | Bus Speed | 1000 unit volumepricing per chip |
|---|---|---|
| Athlon 700 | 100 MHz x 2 | $699 |
| Athlon 650 | 100 MHz x 2 | $519 |
| Athlon 600 | 100 MHz x 2 | $419 |
| Athlon 550 | 100 MHz x 2 | $279 |
| Athlon 500 | 100 MHz x 2 | $209 |
Intel hasn't changed much and takes a lot more money for Coppermine than AMD takes for Athlon. AMD will have to get their .18 micron-process going and integrate their L2-cache on-die as well. Then we'll see if Intel has only caught up or if it will overtake AMD again.
