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March MailbagToronto Star Fast Forward column for March 4/99 Back to White Pages main article index © Copyright, Myles White, 1999 Ooops. I just noticed that the whole month of February went by without a dip into the Computer Wares mailbag. Let's fix that now, shall we? Our first letter comes from David Jones, president of Electronic Frontier Canada, in response to my column on the privacy issues surrounding the just-released Pentium III processor: Professor Jones writes:"Nice article. Too bad you didn't include our Web site address, even though you did include the address for the other organizations cited. Maybe next time?" Sorry about that. How about right now? It was purely an oversight, not a deliberate slight. Electronic Frontier Canada can be found at www.efc.ca. Speaking of chipsI don't blame people for being confused about the choices of PC processors on the market. There are times when it all seems too much to cope with. So, I wasn't surprised that the same column brought several letters from readers asking for clarification among the current offerings. Two in particular, Rick Ringer from Peterborough and Eric Ng from somewhere in cyberspace, are the co-winners of this month's Letter of the Month award - an autographed copy of the 2nd Edition of How to Buy a Computer. Mr. Ringer finds it interesting that the Pentium III is arriving just as he was ready to choose between the Pentium II and AMD's K6-2 and wanted an opinion on the relative merits of them. Mr. Ng, on the other hand, also wanted to know about the K6-2, but had very specific questions about the Pentium II v/s Intel's Celeron: "At the same speed, (400Mhz) which one has the best performance for a power user (e.g. Floating Point Unit, 3D graphics, etc...)? Can we call the Celeron a "cut-down" version of the Pentium II? Finally, I don't understand about this "integrated 128 KB L2 cache" thing of the Celeron. Does this mean that the Pentium II is inferior just because it has the 512 KB built into the cartridge? Please help me demystify these points in plain English." Okay, let's see what we can do. To begin with, the Pentium II processor and the Celeron processor are both manufactured by Intel. The K6-2 is manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel's strongest competitor in the PC market and is based upon its own design. All three processors will run various flavours of Windows as well as other PC operating systems such as UNIX and Linux. Both the Pentium II and the Celeron use the same core which, if Intel had kept up the numbering scheme that began with the 286, 386, and 486, would have been the 686. Both contain instruction sets that include the multimedia extensions called MMX which enhance their handling of specially written software applications that use video, sound, animation, and telecommunications. There is no question that the development of the Celeron, which Intel CEO, Andy Grove, described as the processor that's "just good enough" for people who only want to do some word processing and Internet surfing, came about so that Intel could stave off competition from AMD (and to a lesser extent, another competitor, Cyrix) at the low end of the PC price scale. The first two models of Celeron at 266 and 300 MHz had no level 2 (L2) cache memory (special memory designed to make the processor more efficient) and were disasters as a result. They not only didn't compare well in performance to the AMD and Cyrix alternatives, but in some cases the performance wasn't as good as the earlier Pentium MMX. Subsequent Celerons (300A, 333, 366 and 400 MHz) do have L2 cache memory, 128 KB of it, integrated into the processor die. Because its L2 cache runs at the same speed as the processor, the Celeron got a significant boost in performance. In fact, a 300 MHz Celeron "A" processor with cache comes very close to the performance of a 300 MHz Pentium II, even though the PII has a 512 KB L2 cache inside its cartridge (because the Pentium II cache runs at half the speed of the processor). When we get to higher speeds, however, the match is less even. Although a Celeron and Pentium II at 400 MHz sound as though they're equal, they're not. The 400 MHz Celeron uses a motherboard that runs at 66 MHz, while the 400 MHz Pentium II uses a 100 MHz motherboard. The end result is that the 400 MHz Pentium II-based system will be about 20 per cent faster thatn the 400 MHz Celeron-based unit even if all other factors are even. Now we come to the K6-2 by AMD. The first thing you should know is that the company is poised to release a new model, if it hasn't already by the time you read this, dubbed the K6-3 (formerly "Sharptooth"). The K6-2 has compared favourably in benchmark testing done by independent sources to the performance of similar-speed Pentium II processors. Although the K6-2 has no integrated level 2 cache, it does come on motherboards that will accept anywhere from 512 KB to one meg of cache memory (the more the better). It matches or surpasses PII performance with business applications and comes within a hair's breadth of matching math and multimedia performance. The K6-2 also has the same MMX instructions as the Pentium II and Celeron as well as an advanced multimedia instruction set that AMD calls "3D-Now!" As a matter of policy, AMD always prices its processors to sell for less than Intel's main lines although you'll find K6-2 and Celeron-based systems priced comparably. The K6-3 will also have MMX and 3D-Now!, but aside from higher speeds (350 to 500 MHz) and the ability to run on 100 MHz motherboards, it will also have an on-die integrated L2 cache of 256 KB - twice as much as the Celeron - and also running at the full speed of the processor. Although Intel is said to be working on a Celeron that will run on 100 MHz boards, it hasn't released one yet - and I suspect that the K6-3 will provide it with very stiff competition. Last, but not least, there's the question of upgradeability. Put simply, Pentium II-based systems, with Intel's 440BX chipset on the motherboard, offer an upgrade path to Pentium III because they both use the same (Slot 1) connector and although Intel has released the processor, it hasn't released an updated chipset yet. Neither Celeron nor K6-x systems offer much of an upgrade path at all. Intel is phasing out the Slot 1-based Celeron in favour of a socketed version that uses a proprietary design. AMD's next processor, the K7, also won't use the same socket design as the K6-x series. Free upgrade? How?Just before Christmas, I wrote a review of IBM's ViaVoice 98 and noted that registered owners of the older ViaVoice Gold could upgrade to the Executive version of VV98 for free. What I didn't mention was how...which led to this note from Walter Bell:" I have been trying to download from IBM's Web site the necessary files to get this upgrade of my registered software to no avail. IBM's search says there is no such upgrade. Can you help me?" Yes, we can. According to an IBM spokesperson, "Registered users will be contacted and sent an 'upgrade code' to get their free upgrade." The spokesperson wasn't able to offer an explanation for why you couldn't find a reference at the company's Web site. I've passed your e-mail address on to them and someone from IBM will be in touch. 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