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BUYING GUIDES - Buying a new Processor

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Major Processors Intel Celeron Intel Pentium II Intel Pentium III AMD K6-2 AMD K6-3 AMD Athlon Cyrix MII

Buying a New Processor? 3. Intel Pentium III Much media hype surrounded the launch of the Pentium III in February 1999. There were to reasons - one was the ID chip inside the processor, which in theory would let companies track users around the internet. Many people and US states believed this was an invasion of privacy, so now Intel has released a free application available on their website (www.intel.com), that turns of this feature. As such you should have no real concerns about buying a Pentium III for this reason. The second reason there was a lot of hype, was the Intel claim that the new so-called SIMD extensions would vastly speed up multi-media and 3D applications. However, there is hardly any software that makes use of these extensions so far and their effect has been shown to be of limited value. It's easy to label these SIMD extensions as just a marketing ploy by Intel - and you wouldn't be far wrong! The Pentium III, which is available in 450 to 1000Mhz versions provide reasonably high performance. The Pentium III B is a new addition and uses a 133Mhz front side bus (compared to 100Mhz for normal PIIIs). The benefit of this is minor. Prev | Next