New CPUs from AMD and Intel

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Conclusion

AMD's K6-3 is now the fastest PC-processor for in business applications under Windows98, but as soon as Intel releases the Pentium III 550 the crown will go back to Intel. I have to say that I am a bit disappointed by the K6-3, since it only really shines when running integer operations. Applications with floating point calculations as e.g. 3D-games, voice recognition, 3D-rendering and video compression do only run fast enough if optimized for 3DNow!, Unfortunately AMD wasn't able to do a great job in convincing software developers to do decent optimizations for 3Dnow!, so that the majority of software does still not take advantage of AMD's floating point SIMD instructions, although this instruction set is available for almost 9 months now. It also seems to be obvious that a K6-3 owner should get no other grapics card than a 3Dfx-card. 3Dfx is the only 3D-chip maker that has well performing 3Dnow!-optimized drivers. AMD will definitely have a serious problem to place K6-3. Its Winstone performance would make it eligible to be promoted as a high-end processor, but this won't really work out as long as it performs worse than Celeron in most 3D-games. You can also still not really use it for 3D-rendering or other workstation-software, for those tasks the Celeron is the better and still cost effective choice also. One of the beauties about K6-3 is the fact that any K6-2-owner can drop it into his Super7-board, as long as the board provides enough current. However, this previous K6-2 owner may be disappointed by the 3D-gaming performance of K6-3, because he will find that in many cases it's hardly better than K6-2.

I never really expected Pentium III to be an exiting product, so I'm not disappointed about it, but I have to say that people should still expect more performance from an Intel product that even got a new name. Pentium III's SSE-instruction set may be useful for the future or it may not. The story may not be quite as pathetic as in case of MMX. However, when MMX came out, Intel added several performance enhancing features into their product as well. Thus it made sense changing from Pentium Classic to Pentium MMX, the Pentium MMX was significantly faster than its predecessor, even though it wasn't due to MMX. Pentium III is only faster than Pentium II due to a higher clock speed. We will have to wait if there will be any software that can take a real advantage of SSE. The best step may be Quake Arena, Dragon's Naturally Speaking and the upcoming 3DStudioMax 3.0. If those software titles should indeed show a real performance advantage on a Pentium III-system, then I will recommend it to you. For now, I cannot see why anybody has to rush into buying Pentium III processors. Celeron is still the by far best bang for the buck and Pentium II prices will drop now as well.