Geyserville Technology

Mobile CPU Forecast Chart

Notable P3 Facts

Whether it's for notebooks or desktops, everyone's looking towards Pentium III. According to Intel's plans however, we won't be seeing mobile P3 until September 1999 at the earliest, at which point P3 models ranging in speed from 450MHz to 600MHz will all be announced. The mobile Pentium IIIs will be available in uPGA2, BGA2, and MMC2 formats, providing the full range of options for laptop manufacturers.

What's Geyserville?

Astute readers will undoubtedly notice that the newest 600MHz Pentium III machines will features "Geyserville technology." Is this some form of SSE2, designed to boost performance dramatically from a non-Geyserville chip? Well, essentially, but not in such dramatic terms.

Geyserville is actually an energy-saving (or spending, depending on your point of view) feature, which will increase power to the CPU when your laptop is plugged into the wall socket and receiving AC power. While on the road, CPU power will automatically drop to conserve battery life.

You can read more about Geyserville at Intel's site.

What's happening to Celeron and Pentium II?

It looks like Intel's going to keep the performance gap between Celeron and P2/P3 through the mobile line. The entire Celeron line from the 266 will continue to do service well into 2000. September will see the introduction of the 433 and 466MHz Celerons (which are currently the fastest flavors available for desktops), and the Pentium II will lose any processors under 300MHz.

P2 or P3? What's the difference at .18um?

Another interesting fact is that the entire Pentium II line is going to go Coppermine, moving to a .18um process, and gaining the 256KB on-die cache destined for near-future Pentium III machines. The resulting decrease in size and voltage should make for a healthy supply of CPUs into the mobile market, something that's been lacking since the introduction of the P2 (300Mhz Pentium MMX? No thank you). Unfortunately, we're going to have to wait for the September to see the Pentium MMX line discontinued. Good riddance!