Unlike the jump from Pentium to Pentium II, which could justifiably be described as a revolutionary step, Intel's move from Pentium II to Pentium III is evolutionary. The new chip, which will initially be available in 450MHz and 500MHz clock speeds, uses the same 100MHz system bus, and Intel's preferred 440BX motherboard chipset, as its predecessor.
The main differences are optimisations. In particular, the new chip has 70 extra instructions which have been designed to accelerate the performance of multimedia and Web-based operations such as audio/video streaming. In other words, the Pentium III is to the Pentium II what the Pentium MMX was to the vanilla Pentium.
One highly controversial feature of the Pentium III processor is its machine-readable serial number, which can potentially be used to identify users to remote systems. Intel claims that the purpose of this serial number is to improve the security of online transactions, but its inclusion has been condemned by several civil rights organisations. Apparently as a result of this, Intel is currently developing a piece of software that will 'turn off' this feature if the user so wishes.
Verdict Intel now has at least three different desktop processor ranges to its name. The Pentium III will almost certainly offer much higher clock speeds in the next year than the Pentium II, potentially exceeding 600MHz. Intel is unlikely to have things all its own way, since AMD and Cyrix have their own plans for new processors this year, but for now the fastest mainstream desktop processor for the Windows platform is a Pentium III.
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