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Intel Issues Gag Order on Pentium III Speed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-ask-don't-tell dept.

Matthew Tebbens wrote in to tell us that Intel has gagged vendors from saying how fast the new P3 processors really are and the Preview Day in San Jose on Wed. What are they hiding? We all know that its performance sucks on most stuff.

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  1. I've been using a P3 for months now, and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    and the speed's nothing to get overly excited about. No matter what Intel says, the P3 is jsut a P2 with more instructions- same archtecture, same core, just more registers and more instructions. Which is all well and good if the extra instructions are really usefull.

    Is the P3's KNI useful? Well, kind of. There's no denying that using KNI you can speed up some kinds of floating point math (and only floating point- KNI doesn't do int). However, the speed increase is only really evident when doing a demo that heavily relies on that kind of math. When KNI is only a part of a much larger app (such as a game), which not only does 3D math but also lots of custom drawing, sound, AI, input processing, the speed increase is pretty much lost in the shuffle.

    So, in summary: My pre-release Katmai400 (or P3 as they're now called) is EXACTLY as fast as a P2-400. Don't anybody get too excited, it's just the P2 repackaged.