Log on to the millennium at GigaHertz speed

Question: I’m shopping for a new computer and I want to buy the best machine I can get my hands on. I’ve been looking at a Pentium II 266 MHz machine, but I don’t want to buy that if a 300 MHz or something even better is imminent. Do you have any information about what’s coming down the line? Also, how does the Pentium II differ from the Pentium Pro? Am I headed down the wrong path? –Pat

Answer: It’s great that you want to be on the cutting edge of hardware. I admire your techno-lust. (I also admire your pocketbook, for that matter.) I think we’d all like to join you – you’re about to fulfill what is likely the most common fantasy of the readers of these pages, Baywatch excluded.

So first, let’s deal with the fun stuff. Intel says the 300 MHz Pentium II will be out in the third quarter of the business year, or sometime between July 1 and September 30. If you’re willing to wait, it’s going to be a long summer.

Let’s go over what’s available on the market now and review how the chips differ in the PC world. Since you mention Pentiums, I’ll focus on the Intel line of chips. If you’re looking at the top end, you may want to investigate the K6, made by AMD, an up-and-comer in the chip world that’s said to run as fast or faster than the Pentium IIs.

The Pentium “Classic”, as it has become known, is the first of the breed. It arrived in a 60 MHz flavor, which has long since been discontinued.

The bottom-end produced by Intel is the 100 MHz Pentium. The line tops out at 200 MHz. I bought a Pentium 100 MHz system in 1995. It was the second-fastest machine on the market back then.

Now it’s the bottom end, so as you can see the definition of “classic” has mutated somewhat since Grade 9 English class.

The MMX-enabled Pentium is basically the same chip as the Pentium classic, except that it has 57 new multimedia instructions added. It’s also limited to three versions: the 166 MHz, the 200 MHz, and, as of June, 1997, a 233 MHz version. This chip works similarly to the old one, but when new MMX-enabled software comes along, it will run multimedia applications faster. It will run 20% faster when it runs applications like video and voice recognition software, for example. Despite the promise of the impending bells and whistles, you don’t have to wait for a new generation of software to experience better performance. The chip is immediately 15% faster because it has extra cache built in. Cache is kind of a pre-processing memory that grabs data that is going to be handy for the main processor chip. (By the way, it’s pronounced “cash”, not “cachet”.)

The Pentium Pro came out in November 1995, more than two years before the MMX technology was added to the Pentium Classic. It arrived in four versions: 150 MHz through 200 MHz versions were made available. The Pro never caught on in the home market. Its high price and image as a server platform kept it away. Testing also revealed that it was ideally suited for 32-bit applications, like the Windows NT operating system.

The Pentium II, which arrived in 1997, is nothing new really. Essentially, it’s a Pentium Pro chip with MMX. It also comes in a new casing which means there’s no way it will ever fit in old machines. So if anyone is hoping to upgrade a Pentium to a Pentium II by popping and swapping the chip, it’s not going to work. The new chip casing is shaped like a Hershey bar and fits into a new slot called Slot 1 (the Pentium chip slot was called Slot 7). It’s currently available in a 233MHz and 266 MHz chip. As I said earlier, the 300MHz chip was expected later that summer. One other thing to note about the Pentium II: its secondary cache was moved off the chip for manufacturing cost efficiency, and runs at half the CPU’s clockspeed. The Pro’s cache runs at full clockspeed. Clockspeed refers to the MHz rating of the chip.

As for the future, industry forecasters predict a chip that could debut at 600 MHz and top out at 1 GHz. Intel’s 64-bit chip, the P7, code-named Merced, will be based on a new architecture. Today’s Pentium Pro is a 32-bit chip.

The forecast comes from Linely Gwennap, the editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report. Don’t expect the 1 GHz chip until 1999 or 2000. The fastest chips available today come from Digital Equipment (or DEC). They run at about 500 MHz. CNET computer news says Digital’s processors could also rival the performance of the Merced by the turn of the century. PowerPC processors, the heart of Mac computers, could reach or exceed Merced performance levels. A 400 to 500 MHz chip is also expected from Intel, and competitors AMD and Cyrix, in 1998.