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Doubts still remain over unclothed PIIIs in Japan

What is the voltage, we ask ourselves?

After taking a quick decco at pages we reported over the weekend as having genuine Pentium IIIs, Intel was still maintaining they were not the genuine article this morning. Intel UK said serial numbers on the chips did not match the genuine article. And a reader from the US said: "The top left picture of the 'PIII' in Japan has the voltage listed as 2.0V, but the PIII is actually a 1.8V core chip. "I live in Toledo, Ohio, and there is a local store that has a 'PIII' 500MHz in their display case for $800. "It is wearing a SECC2 but they would not let me look at it more closely. I am sure some of the chips are 'litigament' leaks from Intel but I would have to imagine the vast majority are, in fact, remarks." Intel says the same. The UK representative reeled out a set of figures and serial numbers which did not match any we have seen. But Clive Turvey, who posted a pile of information at his site on Katmai over the weekend, begged to differ. He said: "Intel really gets my goat! I'm not quite sure what drugs Intel is on but here are a couple of thoughts." Turvey said there was no chance of a remark. "Of what," he asked. "Perhaps my PIII 500 is a remarked PIII 450 and that might explain why it runs at 2.0v and not 1.8v. It runs fine at 500 MHz. It is most definitely not an overclocked PII, the chip that I have does KNI. I can prove this too, in fact it would probably be cheaper to fly out and see it run than buy one yourself <G>" Turvey said: "I did some testing using Intel's Katmai Compiler, and you know what, the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) program I compiled ran faster when I optimized for a Pentium or Pentium II than it did when it produced Katmai code. It unrolled and vectorized everything into KNI, and while I don't have the numbers in front of me, I seem to think it was several percent SLOWER than the one optimized to use just x87 instructions!!! Perhaps the Emperor hath no clothes?" Turvey has also discovered an internal Intel presentation, which we have posted elsewhere. ®

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