The chips--code-named Tualatin (pronounced "TWO-ala-tin")--will be the first new and faster Pentium III chips in more than a year, boasting clock speeds of up to 1.13GHz, according to sources familiar with Intel's plans.
The fastest new mobile Pentium IIIs will compete with AMD's Athlon 4 chip--announced Monday--a mobile version of the Athlon that runs at speeds as high as 1GHz.
The five Tualatin chips will run at clock speeds of 866MHz, 933MHz, 1GHz, 1.06GHz and 1.13GHz.
The new chips give Intel two other things it needs to compete in the mobile market: lower power consumption and possibly improved manufacturing yields.
The Tualatin "answers the competition on all fronts," said Mike Feibus, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "I don't see it as a knockout punch, but I do see it as an effective counter" to competitors.
The chips are being built using the company's new 0.13-micron manufacturing process.
The transition from the current 0.18-micron process to the new process provides a number of advantages. It allows for the increases in clock speed while reducing the physical size of the chip, letting Intel manufacture a greater number of chips per single silicon wafer. At the same time, the chips will consume less power.
The five new Pentium IIIs will sport a 133MHz front side bus--the data pipeline that connects the chip to other PC components, such as memory--and are also expected to feature improvements including a larger 512KB Level 2 cache and a new version of Intel's SpeedStep notebook battery-saving technology.
SpeedStep, in its current form, allows a mobile Pentium III to scale back in clock speed and voltage to save power when a notebook switches to batteries. This second version of SpeedStep will take that further, allowing the chip to switch between the chip's lowest clock speed and lowest voltage setting to its maximum voltage and clock speed settings.
"This improves on what we've done" in the past, said Don MacDonald, director of marketing for Intel's mobile products group.
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