Pentium II will be slower, more expensive than Pentium Pro

Intel's Pentium II CPU, due in May, will pose an interesting problem forthe company's marketing force: it's slower and more expensive than thePentium Pro, the CPU it is supposed to replace. The problem: access tothe Level 2 cache is twice as slow as with a comparable Pentium Pro CPU.According to ZDNet, a 233Mhz Pentium II with 512K cache will perform ator below the less expensive Pentium Pro 200 with 256K cache.

Ironically, Intel chose this week to announce their commitment to increasing computer performance by a factor of ten by the year 2000. Whatthey mean is that computers produced in three years will be ten times more powerful than the ones they're releasing today. Of course, most of the increases will come from fixing the real bottlenecks in PC performance.The CPU is probably the most efficient component of today's PC, whereasthe general system architecture is dated: new graphics acceleration hardware, a high bandwidth bus with four times the throughput of PCI, and faster DRAM will all contribute to the speed increases