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June
22, 2000 - By Dave
Altavilla
Technology
marches on at a relentless, blindingly
fast pace. The high end technology
of today will quickly be the main stream
"bread and butter" product of
tomorrow. In the Semiconductor
space, tomorrow often comes VERY
soon. Semiconductor manufacturing
technology seems to advanced in
"light year" increments with
each new iteration of process
enhancement. I can remember days
back less than 10 years ago when 1 micron
or .8 micron IC Fab technology was
bleeding edge. Who would have
thought companies like Intel would be
manufacturing parts at .18 micron line
widths and .13 and .10 clearly on the
horizon.
This
is a review of a product brought to market
with Intel's latest technology in
processor fabrication. For now, this
is the fastest processor you can buy
"over the counter" from Intel's
offering. Let's see what it's made
of.
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| Specifications
/ Features of the Intel
Pentium III 933 |
| The
layout |
|
Click
for full view
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FC-PGA
370 pin Package
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0.18
Micron Process Technology
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133
MHz System Bus
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256
KB Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache
(full-speed)
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Advanced
System Buffering
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Dual
Processor Support
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64
GB Memory Addressbility
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4
GB Memory Cacheability
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Streaming
SIMD Extensions
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Intel
Processor Number Serial Number
-
Dual
Independent Bus Architecture\
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Dynamic
Execution
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Intel
MMX™ Media Enhancement Technology
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28
million transistors
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1.65
Operation Voltage
One
thing you will notice in the above picture
of the Pentium III die is the fact that
the L2 Cache area is by far the largest
section of the chip. That is because
it takes exponentially more circuit area
to design a memory structure comparatively
to the logic structures that make up the
Integer and Floating Point units, for
example. You can easily see why both
Intel and AMD struggled to get SRAM cache
on die versus the discrete solutions on
Slot 1 and Slot A variations of the older
architecture. The on chip Advanced
Transfer Cache running at full speed, is
significantly faster but it takes up a
huge amount of real estate in silicon.
Now
that you've had a quick take of the
internals, let's see what the P3-933 is
packing externally.
As
you can see here, Intel is getting serious
about cooling with their new higher end
processors. Let's have a closer
look.
Click
for full size view
Here
we see our little "Flip Chip"
installed on a Slotket and the new Intel
Heat Sink ready to do its job. In
the first shot, you'll notice the black
plastic clamp with provides excellent
retention force making good contact
between the CPU and the sink. The
thin fin design of the sink is shaped out
of a very sturdy aluminum casting that is
very dense. There are 112 fins in
total, 4 rows of 28. Also, the fan
is extra large and at 5000 RPMs, it
provides great air flow.
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| Installation
/ Setup |
| Cool
beans |
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We
decided to put the new Intel cooler to the
test and see how it compared to the
current champ of Socket 370 coolers, the
Alpha PEP66. Thanks
to our good buds at Plycon for the
hook-up on the PEP66. Go there for
all your cooling needs and you won't go
wrong.
Here
you can see how much larger the Alpha heat
sink is. In the two shots where each
is mounted on our Abit
CX6 i820/RAMBUS motherboard, you can see
that the Alpha is very close to the DIMM
slot. If there were three DIMM
slots, you would lose one to the Alpha for
sure. However, it is with this kind
that the Alpha garners its great
performance. Let's see how the Intel
sink compares to this monster cooler.
We
ran SETI
and an endless loop of Quake 3 demos for
20 minutes on each cooler. We then
took a reading with a thermistor probe
attached to the FCPGA and touching the
edge of the CPU core. In the
results, you can see that the Alpha still
comes out on top with a 1.5C drop.
The Alpha is a great cooler for
sure. Regardless, the new Intel Heat
Sink really gave a good showing.
This is excellent performance for a stock
retail cooler.
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