The most significant improvements that the Coppermine Pentium IIIs will offer over the current generation of Pentium IIIs are the doubling of the existing L1 cache level from 32KB to 64KB and the operation of the L2 cache at full core speed versus the half speed.

In raw performance these two improvements should add an increase of approximately 15 to 25% to Coppermine Pentium III CPUs versus current Pentium IIIs when running at identical MHz levels.

In entertainment applications such as 3D accelerated games, the benefits of the Coppermine's improvements will translate to approximately 5 - 10% depending on how new the application is. The newer the app, the better it likely will have been coded by the developer to take advantage of the higher-end functions of both the Coppermine P3s and the Athlon CPUs from AMD. Expect larger speed benefits to appear in applications that begin appearing in early 2000.

When Coppermine Pentium IIIs debut in October, they will debut in a variety of MHz levels and price points according to publications that have disclosed the information, likely in the following five versions:

P3-500/100 P3-533/133 P3-550/100

P3-600/133 P3-667/133

You'll notice there are two CPUs in that list that are based on Coppermine technology yet operate at a 100MHz front side bus. This is due to the fact that Intel has sold far more 440BX based mainboards than they expected over the past 120 days and they're not anxious to force these consumers, particularly in the corporate arena, to abandon the PCs they just bought.

This way, Intel can offer them CPUs that bring more performance than they currently have without a full system upgrade being necessary.