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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[wabbit]

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.

[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.

[honkhonkler]

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.

[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.

[iustrenght]

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

[ncs]

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.

[anarki]

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.

[ryanpaaz]

The last of the ISA slots....It was a good run.

[markkoops]

Core is based upon P3, ditching the p4 pipeline

[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 :)

[AAAAAAAAA]

Yet, another great video :) Keep it up 🙂

[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.

[Kilowatt]

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

[oldschooldude]

This was the sexy era of gaming. Lived & loved it. Had a p3 933 with a geforce at one point then athlon xp & the rest, well you know.

[msthalamus]

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.

[p_mouse]

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.

[matthouben]

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.

[joerussell]

I know this is about the P3 but my 333mhz P2 was my favorite PC, I loved the cartridge design and it overclocked really well on the front side bus. I didn't realize the P3 was a cartridge design as well, since I went Athlon 64 for my next build, thanks for educating me on this processor.

[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.

[anilchandran]

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