This column is one of the new things at the Tom's Hardware Guide website. It is supposed to give you my very personal view of the things that are going on inside the PC industry and around this website. I hope you will enjoy this weekly editorial. Please feel free to send me your own suggestions of what I should cover here.

Pentium II Will Soon Be Dead, Long Live Pentium III !!!

The latest news for today reached me in form of a press release from Intel. The upcoming processor with the code name 'Katmai' has finally received its christening. From now on we will all speak of the 'Pentium III' and I guess that 'KNI' for 'Katmai New Instructions' will hopefully get a more sensible name as well, maybe it's just going to be the 'new PIII instructions'. Another upcoming product had its christening today as well, 'Tanner' will from now on be known as 'Pentium III Xeon'. Pentium III is supposed to be released on February 28, 1999 and its main difference to Pentium II will be a new instruction set and a few other small architectural improvements. The new instruction set is dedicated to 3D gaming, 3D rendering and all other applications that require floating point processing of arrays of numbers. However, software will only be able to take noticeable advantage of Pentium III as long as it was particularly programmed for the new instruction set. Rumor has it that Intel is pretty disappointed about the small number of Pentium III optimized applications that will be ready at the launch date. From all that you hear it's pretty questionable if Pentium III will be a big hit, it seems as if today's software will hardly run any better than on a Pentium II, only that Pentium III will be clocked at 500 MHz on launch date.

I can put the minds of all the ones at rest, who are worried about the Pentium III CPU, wondering if their systems will still be up to date for it. The platform for Pentium III is going to be the same BX-motherboard that's hosting your Pentium II right now. It will take another 2-3 months more until the launch of Intel's new 'Camino'-chipset (a.k.a. 'Intel 820'), offering 133 MHz FSB (front side bus) and support of direct-RDRAM.

'Celeron', Remember That Name!

The next topic of today's blurb is again dedicated to Intel. Last week Intel released new Celeron processors, all equipped with the now well known and respected 128 kB on-die L2-cache. The new versions are running at 366 and 400 MHz, both using 66 MHz host bus or FSB clock. Unlike the known Celerons 266,300,300A and 333, the new ones are now also available as socketed versions. On the first sight you may think of a Pentium MMX CPU, but when you count the pins you'll find out that Celeron has a lot of pins more than Pentium. It plugs into a socket with a name that was chosen very imaginatively, 'Socket 370'. Celeron for Socket 370 will lower the prices of the CPU manufacturing as well as of the motherboards as compared to Slot1, and a Celeron with 128 kB on-die L2-cache running at 366 or 400 MHz will be damn fast. You could never buy as much computing power for so little money as with a Celeron for Socket 370 and one of the new Socket370-motherboards. The majority of the new motherboards come with onboard sound, thanks to Intel's AC97 idea, so that you only need to get a graphics card and maybe a modem/ISDN card/network card/DSL card and off you go with your new online multimedia PC. My upcoming CPU chart will show you that thanks to Celeron's fast L2-cache, there is only a very tiny performance difference to its big brother Pentium II running at 100 MHz FSB.

Celeron has a very good chance of jeopardizing AMD's K6-2-sales, since even Celeron 366 is already faster than K6-2 400 in office as well as game applications and it's cheaper as well. One wonders also why anyone should buy the much more expensive Pentium II anymore, but didn't I already say that Pentium II will be dead soon?