Intel Pentium III

Microarchitecture: P6

Also known as the "Pentium !!!", the Pentium 3 served as an improvement over the preceding Pentium II. It gained support for the SSE instruction set extension, and initially was sold on what intel called "SECC2" (Single Edge Card Contact) cartridges, rather than a traditional socket. Later chips such as the one above would return to the traditional PGA (pin-grid-array) socket.


Variant: Katmai
An iterative improvement over the previous Pentium II Deschutes core, and the first Pentium 3 core. The main additions to this core include additional execution units and support for the new SSE instruction set extension.

Variant: Coppermine
Largely doing away with the SECC2 Slot 1 connector, Coppermine marked a return to the traditional PGA (Pin Grid Array) socket in the form of Socket 370. The Coppermine Pentium 3 finally integrates a large, on-die L2 cache running at full speed, and ultimately served as one of the first consumer Intel CPU families to reach the 1GHz mark. A later "Coppermine T" revision serves as a stepping stone between Coppermine and Tualatin. Later Coppermine models feature an IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader).

Variant: Tualatin
A die-shrink of Coppermine, and the base core for the popular Pentium III-M line of mobile chips that would go on to form the basis of the Core architecture. All Tualatin chips come with an IHS, and some models in fact remained competitive with their succeeding Pentium 4 counterparts at similar clock speeds. However, limited official chipset support for Tualatin-based Pentium 3s would

Variants: Pentium M, Banias, Dothan, Yonah
An evolution of the Tualatin core that added support for features originating in the Pentium 4 such as SSE2. The Pentium M is a mobile chip that served as a stopgap solution between the ill-suited Pentium 4-M and the upcoming Core microarchitecture that would ultimately succeed both the P6 and P68 microarchitectures. The Pentium M itself was split between two variants, Banias and Dothan. However, the succeeding Yonah core, though branded "Core" in line with Intel's new microarchitecture, Yonah was in fact a final evolution of the Pentium M known as "Enhanced Pentium M" that further added SSE3 instructions and the NX bit.