The Pentium® III Preview

February 19, 1999

If Harmony Central is a site devoted to music, why in the world are we talking about the Pentium® III processor? Well, computers are an increasing part of creating music these days, and some of the technology in Intel's new Pentium III will lead to significant improvements in music and audio applications for PC users. This past Wednesday, Intel gave the world a preview of the new chip and some of the applications optimized for it. Since this was just a preview, complete details on processor performance were not available, but you can get some idea based on relative improvements in some music software discussed below.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett (right) with engineer Jeff Lo during the opening press conference.

The introduction of the Pentium III is going to be serious marketing blitz as Intel plans to spend $300 million for the product launch - their largest marketing campaign ever. You'll probably hear a lot about how the Pentium III can improve your Internet experience, and the impact for the music and audio world may only be a minor point in Intel's mind. That's what we'll focus on here as we give you a glimpse of what's behind the Big Blue Door.

The Technical Details

The big new feature in the Pentium III is the set of 70 new instructions - Streaming SIMD Instructions, sometimes referred to as the Katmai New Instructions. (Katmai was the code name for the chip before Intel decided to name it the Pentium III.) These new instructions will aid in 3D graphics, speech recognition, floating point calculations, and the ability to stream audio within the computer.

These new instructions are similar MMX which was introduced a couple of years ago, but MMX was for integer math and the new instructions focus on floating point operations, which are used heavily in many audio applications. The SIMD acronym mentioned above stands for Single Istruction Multiple Data. With the Pentium III, a program can issue a single floating point instruction (such as an add) to the four new floating point units at the same time. Each of those four floating point units can have different operands (the numbers being added together, for example), hence "multiple data." In most processors, there is only a single unit that executes the instruction. The Pentium III's SIMD structure makes it possible to compute more numbers in the same amount of time.

Intel's Mike Aymar in front the of the Big Blue Door

Software that represents audio as floating point numbers can take advantage of these SIMD instructions. If you're mixing two audio streams together by adding them, the software can now tell the processor to add four pairs of samples instead of one pair. Or an instruction can be issued to multiply four samples of an envelope with four samples of an oscillator output in a software synthesizer.

The Pentium III also has some architectural changes that improve the ability to stream data (such as audio or video) through the processor. This can improve efficiency of audio input and output.

So if you get a new Pentium III based computer, will all your programs run a lot faster because of these new instructions? I'm afraid the answer is no. Your current software may not even run much faster than they do on current Pentium II machines since both processors contain the same basic core structure. Programs need to be optimized specifically for the Pentium III processor to take advantage of these new instructions. Programs that are optimized, however, may show a very significant increase in speed and power. It will take some time for optimized applications to appear, but a number of developers were on hand at the Pentium III preview to demonstrate products already being optimizing, some of which will be available very soon.

The Apps on Display

G-VOX

G-VOX is known for their G-VOX Guitar system which is a combination hardware/software package that allows guitarists to connect their guitar to their computer and see what they play. Now G-VOX has announced the new Interactive Music Suite which will analyze the sound of any instrument (or human voice) recorded into a microphone. This can be used with instructional software that plays an accompaniment, but waits for the user to play the correct note before continuing. The G-VOX driver will also interface with a MIDI sequencer, so now you can turn virtually any instrument into a MIDI device. G-VOX hopes to use this technology to aid in on-line collaboration between musicians and allow lessons to be done over the web.

The view of the preview expo from the open door.

Steinberg

Steinberg has been busy optimizing some of their software for the Pentium III as well. Clean!, their audio restoration and CD burning tool shows a remarkable improvement. (read the press release) On a Pentium III, all the audio processing options can be previewed in real-time while putting less than a 50% load on the CPU. This would normally max out many Pentium II systems.

Cubase is also being optimized. (read the press release) The Espacial plug-in included with Cubase VST has been optimized, along with the built-in EQ. More of the included plug-ins (as well as third party products) will be likely be optimized soon as well. The audio I/O and mixing routines also benefit from the new Pentium III instructions. The demonstration machine at the preview event was running ReBirth and Cubase together with 28 tracks of audio with plenty of CPU power to spare. Free updates including the Pentium III optimizations for Clean! and Cubase VST will be available from Steinberg on March 15.

Yamaha

Software synthesizers need about all the raw computing power they can get and several companies were demonstrating their products as well. Not too long ago, Yamaha released a software synth that included their Virtual Acoustic physical modeling technology. Cool, but it was only monophonic. Now, Yamaha has announced Poly-VL which gives you eight Virtual Acoustic voices - the equivalent of eight VL-70m's! And you can still use 256 standard XG voices as well - the equivalent of 2 MU128's - with the Pentium III!

Seer Systems

Seer Systems has optimized both Reality and SurReal for Pentium III processors. It's a bit hard to measure the degree of improvement since different unit generators have different requirements, but we're told the improvement is significant.

Staccato Systems

Many of the pioneers in physical modeling synthesis founded a company called Staccato Systems a couple of years ago. Their powerful SynthBuilder application was originally developed for NEXTSTEP, but should arrive soon for Windows 95/98. Their physical modeling algorithms also benefit greatly from the Pentium III's new SIMD instructions. In fact, a representative from Virtual DSP Technology (makers of the MidiAxe) was on hand, playing his Parker MIDIFly into a PC running Staccato's software for real-time synthesis. Staccato also mentioned that they are working on an analog-style software synthesizer, which will most certainly benefit from Pentium III optimizations.

Be Inc.

Be Inc. was also present at the event, announcing that the BeOS will be optimized for the Pentium III as well. For audio, this will most likely benefit the performance of the audio codecs, but also the system mixer which can combine the outputs of various programs. It will be up to the individual developers to optimize their own applications. Gamers however will be pleased that the Pentium III optimizations will also improve Open GL performance. Many of the optimizations should be included the release of BeOS 4.1, due later this Spring.

Headspace

Lastly, Headspace, the company founded by Thomas Dolby, and the makers of Beatnik, were in attendance. The Beatnik player will also make use of the Pentium III's features by offering a better reverb and the option of using 44.1 kHz samples. Using their RMF authoring tools should become easier as well. Beatnik Pro will be bundled with Pentium III systems.

Now What?

So when can you get your hands on a new Pentium III system? The official product launch is February 26th, and the marketing blitz will pick up speed on the 28th. Both the 450 and 500 MHz versions will be available on the 26th. A 550 MHz version was also announced, but won't be available until sometime in Q2 according to Intel. By year's end, clock speeds should exceed 600 MHz. It is expected that Pentium III systems will be available for less than $2000, and thankfully they are sure to be getting cheaper all the time.

For additional information about the Pentium III, visit Intel's web site at www.intel.com.