Intel Pentium III 933

Pentium III 933 Specifications

·        29 million transistor 0.18-micron Coppermine core

·        933MHz clock speed – 7.0x clock multiplier

·        32KB on-die L1 cache running at core speed

·        256-bit Advanced Transfer Cache - 256KB on-die L2 cache running at core speed

·        Advanced System Buffering

·        242-pin Slot-1 GTL+ CPU interface running at 133MHz

·        1.70v core voltage

The 933MHz Pentium III is not any different from the rest of the Pentium III line; it is based on the 0.18-micron Coppermine core and actually uses the same stepping (cB0) of the core as the recently announced Pentium III 1GHz processor (also indicating that the 933 should be able to hit 1GHz easily).   

Since the 933 is based on the new core revision of the Pentium III it also runs on a slightly increased core voltage setting than the 866MHz and slower processors, 1.70v instead of 1.65v.  At 1.70v the 933 is still within the operating limits of the Pentium III core so there isn't a reason to worry about the increased core voltage, it is simply a way of accommodating for the higher clock speed.  This is essentially what we do when we overclock our chips and attempt to increase their stability by boosting the core voltage, except when Intel or AMD does it they consider it to be increasing the yield on their higher clock speed parts.

If you’re not familiar with some of the features the Coppermine core offers, the two biggest and most talked about benefits of this core are the Advanced Transfer Cache (ATC) and the Advanced System Buffering (ASB). 

The ATC on the Pentium III is just the fancy name for the on-die 256KB L2 cache.  Keep in mind that the Pentium III isn’t just a Celeron with twice as much cache and SSE, the L2 cache bus has been increased from the 64-bit bus width on the older Pentium III and Celeron processors to 256-bits wide.  The ATC also refers to the 8-way associativity of the 256KB L2 cache on the Coppermine (compared to the 4-way associative L2 cache on the old Pentium III/Celeron). 

Because the 256KB of L2 cache is on-die, the transistor count of the Pentium III is increased tremendously over the 9.5 million transistors that made up the original Pentium III (Katmai) core.  The 256KB L2 adds about 19 to 20 million transistors, putting the total transistor count of the Coppermine at approximately 29 million transistors. 

Advanced System Buffering is a simple term that represents the increase in buffers the Pentium III Coppermine offers over the previous generation of processors, including the Katmai based Pentium IIIs.  If you are interested in specifics, there are now 6 fill buffers, 8 bus queue entries, and 4 writeback buffers (up from 4, 4, and 1 respectively).  These three optimizations all help to take advantage of the 1.06GB/s bandwidth offered by the 133MHz FSB.