Chip giant Intel confirmed today that it will release a 1.13GHz Pentium III at the end of July, but in limited quantities.

The processor will ramp up throughout the rest of this year, however, an Intel representative said. The chip is mainly aimed at the enthusiast market, he added.

That will not become available in quantity until the middle or the end of the third quarter according to documents we saw earlier this year.

This year has seen Intel react to AMD introductions of fast processors in volume by pre-announcing its own Coppermine parts that it has sometimes found impossible to deliver.

Only a week or so back, one major European supplier of PCs said that stocks of all Coppermine desktop processors would be impossible to get until the third week in July.

Meanwhile, rumours are spreading like wildfire that Intel has brought forward the launch of its Wlamette Pentium 4 microprocessor to early September, while the other day Intel confirmed that its server version of this processor, codenamed Foster, would now launch in the first half of next year. ®