What Happened to the Pentium 3 Processor? (Looking back at this awesome CPU family)

It appeared before the millenium and provided a fantastic platform for PC gaming in the late 90's but only ruled the roost for a few years, so what's the story?
The Pentium 3 launched in 1999 and steadily increased its clock speeds via 3 clear processor variants, through to 2002 before being eclipsed by the onward march of the Pentium 4. Let's take a look back at those short few years in this short video, from it's first release until its eventual obsolescence.
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[@honkhonkler7732]

The P6 microarchitecture really didn't end there. The Pentium M is basically a warmed over PIII and the Core Duo is basically a dual core Pentium M. Core 2 is Core Duo with the AMD64 instruction set. Core 2 replaced NetBurst. In an indirect and convoluted way, you could say the Pentium III replaced its own replacement.

[@wabbit234]

Intel's Core 2 line of CPUs were based on the PIII architecture, and again, much better loved than the hot and power hungry P4 series of CPUs, so in away the PIII became the favorite once again.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Indeed, the P4 architecture wasnt scalable so they had to use a different approach! Still those years were insane - your PC speed doubled in just over a year. Recently I was using an i7 2600 from 2011 playing the latest games (admittedly with a newer GPU). Back then if your pc was 2 years old nothing would work on it! What an amazing time to have experienced hey.

[@wabbit234]

@@ByteSizeThoughts It was a pretty magical time to grow up in. Also disheartening as month after month the family computer became less and less capable of running the games I was reading about in PC Powerplay. Still I do feel kind of privileged in a way getting to watch the technology evolve in the way it did.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

So true. I remember feeling quite sad that my 486 seemed to run Red Alert in slow motion after I received the game as a christmas present :) Still played the Russian campaign to completion though!

[@gtzgreatride]

People of hardcore hardware modifications, we used the Intel centrino 1.6Ghz socket 478 on an 875PE motherboard with 2Gb of memory and found the performance gains to be insane due to the fact it worked well with the Nvidia 8800 ultra. This was a Frankenstein of a setup. But much faster than what Intel had on the market during that time.

[@hanrinch]

Yeah the p6 style also comes with security flaw too, that is why intel slowly abandon p6 uarch in the recent years

[@RohitSinghKumar]

Nostalgia… I remember playing Quake 3 on my first PC which was Pentium 3 450 Mhz with 128 MB ram & 20GB Segate Barracuda with Metrox 400 graphics…. Amazing days.

[@Shishkebarbarian]

in Summer 1999, for my 14th bday, for the first time i knew enough about computers to be able to spec it out before asking a local PC shop to build it for us. I was already heavily into PC gaming and I was beginning to see new games come out i desperately wanted to play but didn't have a 3D accelerator to do it (I was still gaming on a P1 133Mhz). the PC my dad bought was a PIII 450Mhz with a Voodoo 3, SB Live! and even a CD-RW drive!! I loved that machine and used it for almost 3 years until i was able to build my first in December 2001 (Athlon XP 1700, GeForce 3 Ti200). what a time it was.

[@iustrenght355]

I was not even born when the Pentium III was released, heck, I was not even for the Pentium IV release, but I found this video very interesting, and the history of the war between AMD and Intel in general

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Cool - glad you liked it! AMD and Intel have been duking it out since the 486 I believe :D I bought my first Ryzen last year so am more of an AMD follower these days :D

[@alexandrebouvier7731]

When I was born, the intel 80386 (1985) was the most powerful CPU on the pc market and my dad had an Intel 8088 (1979) pc (IBM XT clone) runing DOS 3.X on a monochrome display and 5'25 floppy drive (no hard drive). It was super noisy and slow (text based app except few games but they were limited). You make me feel old :p

[@ncs9667]

I went from a Pentium 120, to a Pentium 233 (which were both family computers) and then finally my own first computer was a Pentium III 800EB. It was an absolute beast by comparison lol. Going from your basic family computer to having your own gaming rig is so good, you're finally free! P3 will always have a special place in my heart.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

absolutely know what you mean. I blew a whole months part time wages on a Creative Ultra TNT2 video card back in 99 :D

[@ncs9667]

@@ByteSizeThoughts are you still making videos? I come back to watch this every now and then. You should do one on the Nvidia Riva - TNT2 era

[@Ciffer-1998]

"Going from your basic family computer to having your own gaming rig is so good, you're finally free!" indeed felt the same but 15years later from you, back in 2016 going from family pc with Pentium DualCore E6600 to i5 6600k

[@ncs9667]

@@Ciffer-1998 Haha makes me feel old. But yeah that is cool!

[@AAAAAAAAA403]

Yet, another great video :) Keep it up 🙂

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Thank you! :D

[@markkoops2611]

Core is based upon P3, ditching the p4 pipeline

[@anarki8911]

I used to have a Tualatin based 1.3 GHz Celeron in my first ever PC when i was a kid, that truly was mine and didn't have to share with anyone. It was kind of outdated at that point (It was around 2004-2005 i think) but the memories i have playing all sorts of games from late DOS era games up until anything it could run at a decent speed, still kinda make me miss those times. Back then i always wanted something better, cause it was a pain in the butt getting anything running on it that was modern at the time. Now i just wanna get it back to relive some of those memories.

[@ALPHABYTE64]

I remember my first computer had dual socket 370 motherboard, 2x Pentium III 1.3GHz, 512MB of RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 and Windows XP and I got it in 2006

[@dave4shmups]

Great video!

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Thanks! Glad you liked it :)

[@maxtornogood]

Our Pentium III back in the day was a 866Mhz system with 128MB RAM, 32MB Nvidia Graphics, 20GB Samsung HDD and Windows 98. Many good years with that system!

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Nice, that would've been a cracking little power house machine indeed :D

[@p_mouse8676]

These were overclocking monsters. I remembered very well, overclocking a 667Mhz to 1100Mhz easily. This meant being able to play certain games all of a sudden, instead of not at all.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Thanks for watching! I've actually never tried OC'ing one of my older machines and something I should look into :). I guess you were tuning the Coppermines right? And if so, did you need to put on a better cooler first? These days overclocking is quite a simple process, with my Ryzen they even just have a windows application that can oc the chip so you dont even need to go into the bios and the computer will auto shut down if temps go too high so the chances of destroying your pc are reduced...

[@p_mouse8676]

@@ByteSizeThoughts Thanks. Oh jeez, I really need to dig deep into my memory for that. Heatsinks and coolers were like a whole new thing back in the day. Especially as a teenager, I'm pretty sure I cobbled something together that did the job but wasn't pretty, lol. There were some Windows programs available, but mostly it was just about going into the BIOS. Personally I never experienced destroying anything. That only happens when you take steps that are too big. It was mostly looking around what other people did, take that average on the safe side and then go up with small steps. Testing stability every time.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Agree. Though I do appreciate KZbin - watching crazy people do extreme overclocks with liquid nitrogen and the like :D

[@kokodin5895]

celeron coppermine revision cd0 566mhz/66/128 could eastly hit 1166mhz by covering one bus selsct pin (or snaping them off) fun fact is those cpus had pin for dual cpu enabled so they could run on 2 socket boards unlike other celerons plus there was no need to "overclock them" to run at 133mhz bus after insolating pins of bus select so this mod worked on almost every board even if the bios would not support overclocking, and on stock cpuvcore of 1,5v i had 2 of them and payed for them 0,3$ total in used parts shop

[@kokodin5895]

@@ByteSizeThoughts you should google "upclocking" for tualatin core celerons. most of them could get a 33% bust just by making the board read configuration pins wrong (1.1-1.2 models and one revision of 1,3g model) also there was no problem running tualatins on coppermine only boards, most of them could regulate the lower cpu core voltage just fine, so there were ways ot "convert" tualatin cpu's to work on coppermine boards. i myself had celeron 1100 tualatin on asus cusl2 (not black pearl version sadly) at stock overclock to 1466mhz just by wiremoding the cpu and it worked for more than 4 years as my dayly driver when hd anmie become too much for it (overclocked to 1,7ghz pentium 3 s can play 720p 8 bit matroska just fine if you don't want subtitles)

[@ProgressiveTory]

Very good vid!

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@EC-ol8nz]

3DNow was Meh! Pentium 3 was amazing! If you got one made at the factory in Malaysia... It was golden!!!! Very overclockable!!! I jumped from a 386 to 486 then P3. P3 with a slot 2 MSI voltage board on a long P3 slot you could adjust voltage and control cooling very well. Tx boards from Chaintech, shuttle were good. But Asus was excellent stable! Gigabyte was the best at overclocking P3 with on board FireWire ports 😁 But If u collect old school gaming you have to get a Voodoo card too! The water and reflections were top notch 😁👍🏿👏👏👏👏 Also Micron (USA made), Crucial or Samsung memory was very good. But after 1998-9 became scarce because there was a Typhoon or something 🤔 that wiped out some factories in Asia. After that memory quality suffered. I used this setup overclocked till 2012 then jumped to Mac then 2018 Built up two AMD monsters👍🏿

[@msthalamus2172]

Thanks for the video! Another angle on this story is that, rather than the Pentium 4, the mobile version of the Pentium III was the precursor to the Core processors. They threw the Netburst architecture away and resumed development from the fastest and most efficient processor they had.

[@FOIL_FRESH]

i never had a p3 as a kid. in the last year and a half i've been bit by the retro bug, now i have a 450mhz, 550mhz, 667mhz (666 if you're building a nice doom machine) and then a few months ago i found an ebay seller with 2 unopened, in box, socket 370 866mhz P3s. i couldn't turn that offer down. so i snapped it up and my voodoo 3 pc is a rocket! overclocked it to 950mhz. 14 year old me is very happy now. cheers for another great vid :)

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Holey moley thats an impressive number of P3's in short space of time and 950mhz is a cracking speed for most Win98 games! I've not come across too many here in Sydney for low prices, people are already selling them on ebay for $150+. Voodoo 3's are about the same price at the minute. Am holding out for a lucky score where either I find a machine with one in or on facebook market place! :D

[@FOIL_FRESH]

@@ByteSizeThoughts yeah the 866 is the only one in use, the others just boxed away as spares for the time being. i'm up in bris and noticing the prices rising too even on fbook and gumtree. that being said, i have never seen a voodoo on those, only ebay. i got the voodoo in jan last year for ~100 while there were still like 20 other voodoo 3 options, now they seem really scarce. good luck on your treasure hunts!

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Nice - I wanted a voodoo 1 for my mmx PC and ended up paying $120 AUD for one from Hungary in the end. Would love a Voodoo 2 though they are going for about $200+ at the moment :S

[@FOIL_FRESH]

@@ByteSizeThoughts its a good time to be rich!

[@ducksonplays4190]

@@FOIL_FRESH I also have gotten a lot of p3s from the retro bug in the last year and a half. A 450MHZ gateway gp7-450, 500MHZ gateway gp7-500, 866MHZ dell dimension 4100 and 2x dual 866MHZ penguin servers.

[@matthouben4242]

I still have a computer running a Tualatin based CPU: a Celeron 1.3 GHz (nicknamed the Tualeron). I bought this computer in 1999. Asus P2B motherboard with originally a Mendocino Celeron 400MHz and 64 MB RAM. Upgraded to a Coppermine Pentium 3 and 256MB RAM later on. Now the same motherboard still runs with the Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz and 768MB RAM. Original OS was Windows 98, then Windows XP. I did not dare to put Windows 10 on it, so it now runs on Linux, Debian 10 (Buster). Is used as a box for gaining experience with Debian and as an Apache web server for website development.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Wow - that computer has been fully upgraded and glad to hear its still leading a useful life over 20 years later! I dont do too much on linux but am pleasantly surprised how well it can run on less powerful hardware. I have a lubuntu install that I put on one of the old underpowered netbooks from a decade ago and it breathed new life into it (it was struggling with Windows 7 which is what it shipped with!)

[@RediscoveringRetro]

Uhhh! I'm supposed to be working but I so want to watch this. I'll leave a like and be back later 👍

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

hehe - hope you enjoy it. It's really made me want to hunt down a 1.4Ghz P3 now... :D

[@RediscoveringRetro]

@@ByteSizeThoughts Funny how it grabs you isn't it. I'm currently drawing up a spec and parts list for a P166 mmx, which was what my early teen self first bought. I went to a Slot A K7 750 (I think) from there and through the whole P3 era I was an Athlon kid. I always like listening to people who enjoyed the same same era. Looking at CPUs and GPUs we'd love to buy and buying those big box games. Truly exciting back then, we're very lucky. As always, great video. I know very little of the P3, compared to knowing the Athlon line-up and supporting chiosets very well. Don't forget I've got a P3 stuck in a mobo here that's going unused. Doesn't have any ISA slots unfortunately which is a bit of a bummer if you wanted it as a main DOS rig. If you want a look at it I'll put up a quick video of it.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I actually have a blank memory of what computer I had inbetween my 486 and my P3. I know I had something but have no recollection of what it was! In terms of AMD, I only recently built a new PC around the Ryzen 1600AF - this was my first ever AMD that Ive ever had :). Up till now its been all Intel apart from one Cyrix PC that I scavenged and recently sold on to another collector.

[@paultp12cora24]

I Have Two P3's Still Runing In 19" Rack's With Ga-6BXS Mother Borads ATI Graf And ultra wide SCSI RME Pci 96/52 Hammerfall Sound Runing Cbase 3.75 They Will Be Going Into Retirement Soon

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

nice! what were you using them for? Good going for 20 years of service hey!

[@hanrinch]

The main difference between karmai and coppermine is because ATC has 256bit wide bus and higher cache associativity, plus 133mhz bclk did help abit to boost the performance but the core uarch is remain unchanged. Same thing demonstrates between zen2 and zen3 that the core uarch is the same but cache redesign can affect the performance greatly and best case to show how the same core with different cache can perform variously.

[@Martin_Skywatcher]

I have several older computers but the Plentium III (pun intended) is definitely my favourite, all those big box games that came out during it's lifespan made a big impression on me back then when I only had a PII 200 MMX. About 3 years ago I found a good PIII 500 for sale and I have been collecting big box games since then.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Yep, I found a few older computers nearby and that also triggered my big box pc collecting too! And I am now on many vintage pc and big box gaming facebook groups. We are essentially all addicts reinforcing each others addiction! :D

[@Martin_Skywatcher]

I would say we are in it for the nostalgia. 😉

[@anilchandran3954]

I still use Pentium 3 based laptop(IBM R51) in office with windows 7 and office 2010

[@BroniranEnotBG]

i like this content, up this KZbin

[@mk3a]

I honestly thought Windows XP ran better on PIII than P4. And I was born at PIII's peak.

[@harrylarkins1310]

Does anyone know of any good videos of the changes made to the chips between pentium 1 through 3?

[@rychuwstg]

I have the IBM t20 , p III 750 , 256 mb ram. P3 has power to run every emulator on 2006. I Play epsxe gt2 , Quake 2 , Tekken 3 on this procesor it runs great...

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Ha awesome - I love the IBM T series laptops. One of these days I will get a T42 as its a decent early XP laptop

[@OpticalHaze]

I completly skipped Pentium 3 with a P4. I had a Pentium 2 300mhz upto 2004 unbelievable in retrospec :D

[@mikv8]

You completely ignored the Tanner and Cascades P3 cores featuring 2MB (which is 8 times more than it's little brother Coppermine). Running at just 900MHz with a 100MHz FSB these monster of a processors were able to outperform later released 1.4GHz Tualatins in many applications. Also what I would've mentioned is the fact Katmai/Tanner P3 isn't much different from the Deschutes P2, it's basically the same chip with SSE added and does not truly deserves to be called a P3, the real P3 however is the Coppermine/Cascades with their Advanced Transfer Cache were much more powerful than the original 450-600MHz P3 family. Also what happened next was Banias Pentium M in 2003 and Dothan in 2004. These mobile monsters are basically server stuff with their unheard of 2MB cache (remember their grandpa Cascades?) packed in laptops were so powerful they were able to leave much more higher clocked P4s and Athlon 64s in dust. Pentium M eventually evolved to the Core Duo and then Core2 in 2006. This is a short story of the Pentium Pro core evolution from 1995 to the Core2 in 2006 and Pentium III were just a small part of the story.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Yeah I didnt go into the Xeon processors on this video as that would've opened up a whole section for sure, one for hopefully in the future. Though the server processors are something that I didnt have first hand experience with back then. However, as you rightly said, the technologies pushed in the server/desktop procs wind their way down into the mobile chips. I was researching recently the old PowerVR graphics cards when they were up against 3DFX and NVidia but was interested to find out that the technology decendants are still used today in mobile phone chipsets. Thanks for watching and taking the time to add in the extra information here! (And one of these days I hope to pick up a Pentium Pro system for myself to play with but prices are through the roof)

[@gotsm9959]

The pentium4 was horrible because it overheated despite how you try to cool it because entropy takes over because the silicone will heat faster than it can be cooled as soon as you overclock. The very last Pentium 4 actually had 2 threads despite being a single core but experienced gamers would have turned it down knowing the Pentium D was around the corner and safely overclockable to 5ghz.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I skipped the P4 back then but have been looking for one recently to become a high end Windows 98 machine - but all the ones I come across have swollen and bloated caps. So not only were the processors not particularly great, most components from that period were not made to last

[@gotsm9959]

@@ByteSizeThoughts Yes the p3 was only supposed to last 3 years because otherwise intel won,t make money off you.Most things can work off chrome extentions but there is always atleast on filler software like five9 that ensures windows is required.

[@ivorybarksdale6780]

How about you do any coverage about the Pentium 4 (HT)

[@camjohnson2004]

I had 2 Pentium III processors, the original Katmai 450MHz and then later on a Coppermine 1GHz. The 1Ghz model co-existed with my Athlon 700Mhz system, which took over as the main system thanks to its better FPU and game performance. The Pentium III Katmai was my favorite, as it managed to clock over 650Mhz with a new cooler and a ASUS P3B motherboard. The Katmai replaced my Pentium II 333Mhz

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Thats a pretty decent overclock back in the day, probably gave you an extra 9 months out of the machine due to the pace of CPU speed increases back then! :D

[@camjohnson2004]

@@ByteSizeThoughts When i brought the P3 450 after verifying it worked i instantly got a new larger cooler and pushed it as far as i could. It was a good CPU, when I got the AMD Athlon 700Mhz i instantly knew the K7 was the new kid on the block. I even got my hands on the "Goldfinger Device" and was able to push the 700Mhz K7 to 950Mhz with a very beefy cooler aswell. I got a 1Ghz P3 when they came out and the Athlon still beat it, so i sold the P3 and kept the Athlon system

[@ee0275]

Too bad the p3 didn't have sse2 or else I would be able to use steam on windows 7.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I was quite sad earlier this year when my Vista machine (I use for late XP games) connected to the internet and Steam uninstalled itself as its no longer supported. Steam on a late p3 couldve been interesting as there are so many classic games available on it.

[@engchoontan8483]

What will happen if = year 2020 cheap dual-core Arm RISC expanded to 25nm process (coppermind) run at 733Mhz with L3 as 4GB RAM at DDR dual-channel 2x400Mhz = 800Mhz = as an SoC with 2 pairs to make 4 cores and double (cheapest)mali(run at 800Mhz) per pair making 6 cores in total and packed as a SBC and count TDP of big contact patch cheap wafer die-size mobile-phone-cover and battery usage.? Which area need to improve.?

[@LaurentiusTriarius]

The first pc I bought & build with my own money out of work was a 900mhz P3 with a whole 2GB of ram and 133mhz fsb, the ram, gigabit motherboard and CPU were more expensive than the Honda I was driving back then and the power supply a week of food. Great times.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

The sacrifices made made you appreciate the computer more I have no doubt :D

[@LaurentiusTriarius]

@@ByteSizeThoughts I had to build another one just a couple of months later since my roommate kinda stole it "for school work" and ... games. I made the next one a very stealth sleeper and sold the original beast to my roommate (;

[@dennistzortzopoulos8606]

Now the new i9 can hit 6ghz

[@somecuntxxx]

my dad worked at 3dfx and the pentium 3 was "a mess" during NPC development, turning everything into a glitchy mess.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Thats a good alternative perspective. Wouldve been a lot of work to get hardware all working together back then. I currently have a 3dfx Banshee in my pentium 3 500Mhz which works pretty well :) So please pass on my thanks to your dad for all the hard work over 20 years ago!

[@aliagree8448]

gr8

[@nandinho86]

I had a Pentium iii at 1Ghz and it was really fast for the time. It also ran cooler than the atrocious pentium 4

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I wouldve loved to have had a 1Ghz cpu when it came out - cpu speeds were increasing sooo rapidly in those years

[@nandinho86]

@@ByteSizeThoughts That's true. In early 2001 we already had 2ghz p4

[@glr_wureviver]

Intel pentium III successor is pentium M (a.k.a centrino) in laptops, and core 2 and dual core in desktop. Pentium 4 is crappy netburst.

[@daddad9978]

i was jokes that i have Pentium 3 500mhz geforce 256 sdr and 256mb ram from 2001 but the real one is Pentium 3 600mhz tnt2 16mb and 128mb ram from 2001 and i upgrade my pc to Pentium 3 733mhz geforce 256 ddr and 256mb ram