Camino to appear in Q1 2000, says Intel

Coppermine based Pentium IIIs will hit speeds of almost 800MHz sometime in Q2 next year, according to the latest leaks from Chipzilla’s roadmap. Internal Intel charts show a 733MHz (133MHz FSB with a 5.5x clock multiplier) part aimed at systems in the $1.5 - $2K price range and a mysterious '7XX' part for systems in the over $2K bracket. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that a 6x multiplier would result in a speed of 798MHz. Due to ongoing Camino misery, Intel has pulled the venerable 440BX chipset off the train to the gulag and now plans to keep selling the Seattle 2 mobo well into Q2 next year. Although only a 100MHz FSB board, the latest BIOS rev already enables the SE440BX-2 to support the first Coppermine PIIIs up to 700MHz. The troublesome Camino i820 chipset is now targeted for early Q1 2000 with the 810e entry-level chipset being pushed upmarket to support midrange systems as well as cheap ‘n’ cheerful Celeron boxes. We confidently predict that the 820 to fail to appear in this timescale – prove us wrong, Intel.. Little Celeron is billed to hit 566MHz by Q2 next year in systems costing between $900 and $1,000. Chipzilla sees the cheapest Celeron boxes costing less than $799 with a 500MHz processor. Evidence of continuing chipset woes can be found at the high end too, with 4 and 8 way Xeon systems being limited to a 100MHz FSB while faster 133MHz FSB parts will only run in dual processor configurations. PIII Xeons will hit 750MHz at 100MHz FSB and 1Mb or 2Mb level 2 caches for quad capable systems, while if two processors are enough for your needs, you can have an 800MHz 133FSB part with 256K of on-die cache. Real power freaks wanting 8way systems costing more than $50K will still be stuck with a 100MHz FSB and a relatively leisurely top speed of 550MHz until at least the middle of next year. ®