Meet Pentium III, the fastest processor for today's PC

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Have you ever tried using a voice-recognition program such as IBM's ViaVoice or Dragon NaturallySpeaking? If you have, you will know that before you can start using it, you will have to train the program to recognize your voice and your style.

Honestly speaking, the training process is no fun. Although I've been learning to speak English for more than three decades now, I still have difficulty pronouncing the words that the program wants to hear me say. I have to repeat simple words such as "provision" and "practicality". Of course the programmaker had a very good reason for choosing these words for the training purpose. These words have unique characteristics that will represent my pronunciation. If the program can capture my idiosyncrasies, it will be able to recognize most of what I say and turn it into typed text.

Depending on the speed of the processor and the size of the memory (voice recognition programs demand a hefty amount of RAM), the training may take from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. If your pronunciation is as lousy as mine, you'll need to spend even more time.

Knowing all this, I was very surprised when Terence Chan, Intel Architecture Manager for Malaysia and Indonesia, told a group of IT journalists, myself included, that with Pentium III the training would take only 20 seconds. How could that be? Can you pronounce two dozen words in just 20 seconds? It turned out that thanks to new technology introduced in the new processor, the so-called Single-instruction multiple data (SIMD, pronounced "sim-dee"), Dragon NaturallySpeaking needs only that amount of time to register a user's voice. Of course, you need to use the version of this voice recognition program that has been optimized to take advantage of the new technology.

SIMD

In a nutshell, SIMD allows one instruction to handle more than one data bit, and it will expedite the processing. The Internet Streaming SIMD extension, as Intel calls it, consists of 70 new instructions, which are aimed at increasing the performance of advanced imaging, 3-D, streaming audio, video and speech recognition applications.

Why do we welcome the speed at which the voice recognition can create our speech profile? In the past, because it used to take so much time and effort to train the program, we would not be interested in training more than one machine to recognize our voice. This has limited the real usability of the voice recognition capability. Now that the process can be so quick and easy, application of voice recognition can be extended even to ATM machines where you can give a voice command to that machine and instruct it to dispense cash for you. In other words, because the training takes so little time and effort, people can now easily share one machine.

PSN

Another significant new feature introduced in Pentium III is the Processor Serial Number, or PSN. It is a unique ID number that each Pentium III processor has. Originally, Intel designed the processor so that the PSN would be automatically available each time you start your PC. The idea is to enable businesses on the Internet to get additional identification to make sure that, for example, it is really you who are placing an order for the latest compact disc from Elton John. In other words, Intel thought the PSN would help accelerate the growth of e-commerce.

However, those more concerned about privacy were against the PSN right from the beginning. They feared that the PSN would be used by marketers to create profiles of Internet users and thus would impinge on their privacy. Intel responded quickly by turning the PSN off by default. If the user decides to turn it on, he can use a bundled utility to do so -- although he will still have to reboot his system before the PSN becomes available.

Personally, I think the concern that the PSN would compromise privacy on the Internet is ludicrous. The benefits, as I see it, far exceed the risk, and actually, Intel should have started putting the PSN on every chip that it made a very long time ago.

Imagine just how many people were cheated by unscrupulous computer store owners who used remarked chips on the systems that they sold. In the past, there was no easy way an inexperienced user could verify the originality of the processor inside the box. Today, with the PSN, it will be close to impossible for crooks to fake the processor and cheat unknowing buyers. But, it wouldn't be America if people didn't defend privacy to the extreme!

Other features

The core of the processor, which contains 9.5 million transistors, is packaged inside the Single Edge Connector Cartridge 2, or SECC 2. Just for comparison, the older generation Pentium II contains around 7.5 million transistors. The Pentium III is built using the .25 micron process technology, which allows the chips to run at higher clock cycles. The current versions of Pentium III run at 500 MHzand 450 MHz, both of which have 512 KB of L2 cache. We can expect to see the 550 MHz version in the second quarter of this year. Intel already demonstrated its 1 GHz chip to developers some time ago, but we may not see the production version this year.

You can use two Pentium III in tandem if you like, and the system can handle up to 4 GB of RAM. That's a lot of memory, given that the current sweet spot is 64 MB. The processor is also compatible with the widely available 400BX AGPset chipset. Obviously it also inherits all the technologies introduced in its predecessors, such as the MMX Technology, dual independent bus and dynamic execution.

Intel has promised to let me test drive one of the fastest production PCs on planet earth one of these days. When I have that machine in my testing room (a.k.a. my living room), hopefully I'll be able to verify whether NaturallySpeaking really needs only 20 seconds to get familiar with my voice. I'll definitely share with you the excitement -- as well as disappointment -- if I have any. Stay tuned.