NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article
Intel's Pentium III -- The New 3-D Chip
by Charles Blanchard, February 2000
cblanchard4@juno.com
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The Pentium III is Intel's wonderful new chip that is supposed to double the speed of the Pentium II. Sounds good, so let's see what it is as well as what it can do.

The original Pentium chip received a boost in speed when the MMX "extensions" added 57 instructions that were designed to speed up the processing of repetitive instructions based on integer (whole number) calculations - the most commonly used type of instructions. By rewriting some of the chip's microcode, the Pentium III's so-called Streaming SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) extensions do the same for instructions rooted in floating point (or floating decimal) math. By building-in 70 new functions including ones that help it run the most demanding programs up to twice as fast as the quickest Pentium II processor, they now have a new processor that will run games and 3-D images faster than ever before and also give them better resolution.

That is important because the use of images is growing very quickly and Streaming SIMD technology is well-suited to making fast work of calculating the geometry of 3-D pictures. By more quickly processing the repeated floating point operations that create the vertices within 3-D objects or calculate how various light sources reflect off those objects, for example, Streaming SIMD instructions enable a Pentium III system to rapidly and realistically paint such images on the screen.

Intel hopes that this ability will give 3-D game developers and other programmers the freedom to endow their creations with real-world subtleties (such as complex lighting effects) that they otherwise might shy away from for fear of over-loading a PC's processor. Though few programs can take advantage of the Pentium III's multimedia boosters now, over 200 programs that can take advantage of Streaming SIMD extensions are either available or about to be.

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