Jack Scott's Blog

Yesterday evening in the mail I received, amongst a whole package of computer junk I didn’t really want, a couple of socket 370 CPUs. Four of them, to be exact. One is a Pentium III Coppermine CPU proper (an SL52R), the others are Celerons of various speeds.

You’ll notice that the SL52R is the same sSpec I was raving on about in my last post on this subject. So why did I rush out and buy one? Because to me, it has beautiful proportions. 1GHz is a nice round number. In my opinion the amount of cache is a nicer number than any other amount (256KiB instead of the 128KiB found in the Celerons and some Pentium IIIs), and the core voltage is nicer (1.75V). I would have preferred a 100MHz bus speed (instead of 133MHz), since that’s a nice round number, but you can’t have everything. Plus, a 133MHz bus does go a lot faster.

Unfortunately the picture isn’t mine; my digital camera has decided not to work in the cold this morning.

Pentium III Coppermine SL52R

I’ve decided to start a new collection. I used to collect Coca-Cola merchandise, but lately I haven’t found much worth buying. It’s also not especially geeky. So, I’m going to start collecting Intel Pentium III ‘Coppermine’ CPUs. I don’t have an exact figure on how many to collect there are, but my guess (based on perusal of Wikipedia and Intel’s site) is around 40-50.

Luckily for the collector, each Intel CPU has written on it something called an sSpec, which is a five-digit code (such as SL52R) that uniquely identifies each class of chip. For instance, the SL52R is a 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine with 256KiB of L2 Cache and a FSB speed of 133MHz.

As with any collection, there is a bit of a challenge with some rarer items. For this collection, my hope is to get my hands on one of the recalled 1.13GHz chips produced in 2001. They were recalled due to being completely awful and crashing all the time, so finding one might be difficult.

For me, the Coppermine core represents a pinnacle in x86 micro-architecture design. After the Coppermine and Tualitin core designs (both based on Intel’s P6 micro-architecture), Intel decided to up the ante with the Netburst micro-architecture. Netburst, used for about 4 years in the Pentium 4 series, was widely known for producing more heat than a 2-bar radiator. Indeed, when Intel went back to design the Pentium M and Core 2 CPUs, they based them off the P6 micro-architecture.

I truly believe that computers today don’t need half the power they have. Recently I tried BeOS, an operating system that hasn’t even existed for most of a decade. That ran fine on hardware half as powerful as a Coppermine CPU. It could do email (quite nicely, too), web browsing (with Flash), an office suite is available, all the usual productivity applications. But, it didn’t consume 6GB of hard drive space to do so, didn’t need 1GB of RAM (the virtual machine running it uses about half of it’s 128MB allocation), and didn’t need a 2GHz processor (these are rough installation specs for Windows Vista). It’s starting to become more and more clear to me that we are just wasting so much time, money and energy on doing things that don’t need to be done, like Aero.

So where was I? Oh yeah, bidding on old CPUs.