The Pentium III Coppermine offers many benefits over its previous core (KATMAI). The Coppermine offers a 0.18-micron technology compared to the KATMAI core, which was distributed on the 0.25 process. This technique will allow the CPU to be distributed in a smaller size. The 0.18 process allows the implementation of over 3 times more transistors, which is a big move forward. Compared to the KATMAI core (9.5 million transistors) the Coppermine core uses 28.1 million transistors. This is due to the direct L2 implementation on the chip, which uses a large amount of space on the core. This offers many other benefits over the 0.25 process, one of the primary ones being lower voltage use. A FC-PGA Coppermine chip uses 1.60volts compared to the cartridged version of the Katmai, which uses 2.0 volts. Even when compared to a cartridged Coppermine, which at 1.65 volts, is 0.5 volts more than the FC-PGA. This will end up requiring less cooling and keeping the CPU cooler. And as we step up to the 0.18 process, overclocking is a very good possibility. As you may already heard, the Katmais are already pushing their limits. The 0.18 process won't limit us in that scene anymore. A simple 550E can do at least 682 MHz (124 FSB x 5.5) with a simple heatsink. The direct L2 implementation is another big improvement. With the release of the Pentium III in February 1999, Intel decided to use their old strategy on the L2 memory, keeping it separated from the core. This was mostly because of a lower cost of production. The Coppermine includes 256k of L2 memory implanted in the chip, running full speed. Even with the KATMAI 512k of L2 cache (half-speed) the Coppermine runs faster with 256k of full speed cache.
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