New CPUs from AMD and Intel

Intel's New Pentium III

The Pentium III, also known under the code name 'Katmai', does not come with a feature that would show an immediate performance increase as in case of the K6-3. Its basic core as well as the L2-cache architecture is identical to the Pentium II processor. The justification for the new name lies in a set of 70 new multimedia instructions, once known as 'KNI', now known as 'SSE' standing for 'streaming SIMD extensions'. Those new instructions enable the CPU to perform floating-point calculations on multiple data at the same time, which proves very helpful for 3D graphics, video encoding and decoding and other floating point intensive applications that operate on large sets of data, as e.g. voice recognition. Unfortunately this doesn't simply work on its own, the application has to be programmed for 'SSE' specifically, which means that none of the currently available software will benefit from Pentium III's new instructions at all. We should also not forget that this beautiful 'SSE'-stuff is not exactly a new invention, AMD released their very own set of floating point SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions last year in June, called '3DNow!'. We have learned that K6-2 with its 3DNow!-instruction set is showing a decent performance improvement when running applications that are written for 3DNow!, but we also know how many applications are not '3DNow!-optimized'. With the Pentium III we are facing pretty much the same, we will only benefit from its new instructions if software is 'SSE'-optimized. Without that enhancement software will run identically on a Pentium III as on a Pentium II at the same clock speed. 3D-games that are supposed to take advantage of Pentium III's new instructions will require DirectX 6.1 and up, without that you won't find much of a benefit.

If you need more information about the new features of Pentium III, please have a look at my article from Microprocessor Forum 1998 .