Intel took the wraps off its Coppermine "next generation... with performance optimisations" Pentium III chip at Microprocessor Forum today. Chipzilla project architecture manager Jim Wilson would only say that Coppermine will become available "later this month" at 700MHz or greater, but as The Register has already reported, the chip is set to ship on 24 October in at 733MHz. Wilson said the chip will be made available in standard desktop, Mobile and Xeon server/workstation versions simultaneously. Coppermine will feature 256K of on-board L2 cache and despite retaining the same P6 core that Intel has been using for the last five-odd years, operate at around 25 per cent faster than the current, Deschutes Pentium III operating on the same 133MHz front-side bus that Coppermine uses. According to Wilson, the improvement is due to the speed gains of bringing the L2 cache onto the die and upping the cache bandwidth, and increasing the chip's buffers to accelerate the flow of data through the processor. Coppermine's release was brought forward, primarily to tackle AMD's 700MHz Athlon. Wilson claimed the 0.18 micron chip was also highly scalable, with the processor easily capable of increasing to 800MHz and beyond, allowing Intel to keep up with whatever AMD comes up with in the near future. ®