Intel Breaks 1 GHz, presents Pentium III

Staff -- Semiconductor International, 4/1/1999

 Intel Breaks 1 GHz, presents Pentium III

In a demonstration shown to attendees of the Intel Developer Forum in Palm Springs, Calif., a Pentium III processor broke the 1 GHz barrier. The device, made using 250 nm (0.25 µm) technology, is now commercially available in 450 and 500 MHz versions. According to Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.), this was the first time the 1 GHz frequency has been achieved on a standard microprocessor. About a year earlier, IBM researchers achieved a 1.1 GHz clock speed on an experimental Power PC compatible integer processor.

In the demonstration, a CPU speed meter registered greater than 1 GHz clock speed on a system running a PowerPoint application. The demonstration setup, which used special cooling techniques, was not standard. The company expects to introduce processors this year using 180 nm (0.18 µm) process technology and produce commercial microprocessors operating at 1 GHz frequency in the year 2000.

Advances over the Pentium II include 70 new instructions, 3-D, streaming audio, video, and speech recognition applications. Benchmark tests showed the 500 MHz Pentium III outperforming the 450 MHz Pentium II by 93% for 3-D calculations and 42% for multimedia applications.