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Last revised:
10/27/1999

Intel Celeron and Pentium III FC-PGA Performance
Intel Celeron and Pentium III FC-PGA Performance
page 1 of 2

Intel Pentium III FC-PGA Just when AMD releases their slot A Athlon processor, Intel pulls a fast one and decides to move their Pentium III slot 1 processor back to a socket 370 design, or technically, what Intel calls FC-PGA (flip-chip pin grid array). The current Pentium III family consists of the following speeds: 350, 400, 450, 500, 550, and 600MHz, and it is designed around what Intel calls the "Katmai" core. The next generation Pentium III family (mainly 600MHz and up) will be designed around the new "Coppermine" core; these new processors will still be call Pentium III's.

As mentioned above, the Intel Pentium III family consists of two core designs codename Katmai and Coppermine. But note that the Coppermine core doesn't actually use copper technology. The table below shows the differences between the two cores, as well as the Celeron processor:

Features Celeron Katmai Coppermine
Front Side Bus 66MHz 100MHz 100/133MHz
L1 Cache64K 64K 64K
L2 Cache128K 512K 256K
L2 Cache SpeedFull CPU Speed 1/2 CPU Full CPU Speed
MultimediaMMX SSE SSE
InterfaceSocket 370 Slot 1 Slot 1
Socket 370
Micron0.25 0.25 0.18

The main differences between the Katmai and Coppermine core are as follow:

  • Coppermine processors are fabricated using 0.18 micron technology; this translates into higher processor speed, while reducing heat output
  • Coppermine processors are equipped with 256K of on-die L2 cache, running at full CPU clock speed; this is similar to the Celeron's 128K L2 cache
  • Coppermine processors are available in either 100MHz or 133MHz FSB

    Let's look at the performance comparison between the socket 370 Celeron CPUs and the socket 370 Pentium III. The Pentium III "Katmai" is not included because a slot 1 Intel 810 chipset motherboard wasn't available. Here is the test system configuration:

    Component Celeron/Pentium III System
    Motherboard Microstar MS-6178 version 1.1 - socket 370
    Chipset Intel 810-DC100
    Memory 64MB PC100
    BIOS Version Award version 1.3
    HDD Quantum Fireball 8.4GB ATA66
    Video Intel Direct AGP
    Operating Systems Windows 98SE and NT 4.0 Workstation SP5

    The following table summarizes the Celeron and Coppermine Pentium III FC-PGA processors used in this test:

    Processor L2 Cache Front Side Bus (FSB)
    Celeron/466 128K 66MHz
    Celeron/500 128K 66MHz
    Celeron/533 128K 66MHz
    P3/500 FC-PGA 256K 100MHz
    P3/550 FC-PGA 256K 100MHz
    P3/600 FC-PGA 256K 100MHz
    P3/650 FC-PGA 256K 100MHz
    P3/672 FC-PGA 256K 112MHz - overclocked by using 112MHz x 6.0

    Ziff-Davis Winstone 99 measures overall system performance by running through a series of commonly used business and engineering applications. Likewise, Winbench 99 measures the performance of a specific part of the system; such as video or hard disk drive performance. Higher numbers are better.

    Winstone 99 Business/98SE
    The graph above shows the relative performance between the Celeron 466, 500, and 533MHz CPUs (orange bars) against the Coppermine Pentium III at 500, 550, 600, 650, and and 672MHz (green bars). The test suite is Winstone 99 under Windows 98SE. The Pentium III/672MHz is overclocked by using a 112MHz FSB x 6.0 = 672MHz. And as expected, due to the larger L2 cache and higher clock speeds, the Pentium III CPUs easily beat the Celeron processors. Even the PIII/500 FC-PGA is faster than the higher clock speed Celeron/533.

    Winstone 99 Business/NT
    Under Windows NT 4.0 workstation, the performance gap between Celeron and Pentium III is even greater. This is due to the fact that the NT applications are more CPU intensive than those tested under Windows 98SE.

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