Intel Pentium III E "Coppermine" (Slot-1)

The Athlon’s superior FPU comes in handy in the High-End tests that are centered around FPU intensive applications (i.e. CAD Drafting, Photoshop, etc…) which give the Athlon 700 a 9% performance advantage over the Pentium III 733E. On the "lower" clock speeds it takes the Pentium III 733EB to beat out AMD’s Athlon 600 which gets my recommendation for the best overall performer for the price out of the CPUs compared here.

Although the Athlon is no longer the undisputed champion of the world, it’s superior architecture can easily outpace that of the Pentium III E which is still based on a 3 year old design albeit heavily modified.

An interesting point to make is that the Pentium III 600B (512KB L2 at 300MHz) is actually 3% faster than the new Pentium III 600EB (256KB L2 at 600MHz). This is the perfect real world situation where applications require more than the 256KB L2 offered by the Pentium III E and would benefit with a CPU with a larger although somewhat slower L2 cache.

Intel is hoping to limit the number of cases where older Pentium III CPUs with their larger L2 caches beat out the newer CPUs by limiting the clock speeds of the older CPUs to 600MHz, forcing them to die off as they are ultimately replaced by the newer Pentium III E chips. This is the same thing Intel did with the Pentium Pro and the Pentium II back in 1997. The Pentium Pro’s L2 cache ran at clock speed and often outperformed a higher clocked Pentium II 233 while running at 200MHz. Needless to say the expected release of the Pentium Pro 233 never came along and the CPU quickly died off since it couldn’t compete with the higher clock speed Pentium III processors (300MHz+).

Another point to make is that even if Intel were to allow higher clock speed Pentium IIIs to be released, the current 0.25-micron process seems to max out at around 600MHz meaning that any increase in clock speed would have to follow a tweak of the core itself. Thus we say farewell to the 512KB L2 Pentium II/III design that has been with us for two years now and welcome the new Pentium III E.