First look at Katmai

Regardless of whether you're planning on upgrading soon, you're probably very interested in Intel's newest performance CPU, the upcoming Pentium III Processor, with its "SSE" instruction set, new processor state, doubled L1 cache, and of course, higher clock speeds.

We're going to be given the opportunity to run a few tests on the P3 sometime soon, using a standard BX motherboard at 100Mhz FSB. Until then, I've got a couple of interesting pictures we were able to snag for ya.

The plastic "back," or SECC2

The Single-Edge-Contact-Cartridge II is the new generation of Slot 1 for Pentium II and III. You can't see it too well from this angle, but notice how the contacts are visible from behind the plastic. This is because the casing isn't a complete "cartridge" anymore, but rather just a cover that snaps onto a pair of mounting holes on the PCB. The processor core and cache chips are "naked" and visible on the opposite side.

Newly manufactured Pentium II processors are also available as SECC2, and as you can obviously see, the plastic casing on our Katmai even says "Pentium II" on it. The four holes are where the factory-installed heat-sink locks in.

The plastic "back," or SECC2

Here you see the front of the SECC2 package - notice how the core is exposed and elevated over the rest of the components. The heatsink connects through the four holes around the core, and on our sample was factory-installed, requiring 50 lbs of pressure and a custom pressing machine to install. The small, blue center of the CPU is THE ONLY PART OF THE CPU which contacts the heatsink. I'll get to heat issues in a little bit.

What's interesting here is the cache. At least on the sample we saw, the cache chips were not in contact with the CPU, but considering the amount of heat generated by the CPU, maybe that's a good thing. The cache chips are rated at 4ns, and are labeled:

SEC Korea 835
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