New Superchips

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I'm sitting at a new Dell Dimension XPS T500--one of the first generation of PCs to sport the new Pentium III chip. It's a sweet machine and, at $2,679, fully appointed with a 4.8X DVD player, 20-gigabyte hard drive, 128 megs of RAM, 17-in. Trinitron monitor and so on. At 500 MHz, it's one of the fastest PCs you could buy as of last week. So what am I doing with all that turbocharged horsepower? Bowling.

The program, Brunswick First Strike Bowling, sold by THQ, is still in development and shows what a good coder can do with the P3 chip. Watch as your bowler releases a gorgeously rendered three-dimensional-looking bowling ball. It seems as if it's made of dense blue marble--you can see the overhead lights of the room reflect off of it as it rolls down the alley, which is highly waxed and glistens. It reminds me of the Pixar-style animation you see in a movie theater. It's so real it makes me want to start smoking again.

The early rap on the P3 is that it isn't much of an improvement over the Pentium II, whose best of breed clocks in now at 450 MHz. This strikes me as nonsense: the new generation of superchips will push home computing to a higher level that will be immediately apparent to anyone. You'll see it in games, whose graphics will suddenly seem to punch out into three dimensions. You'll hear it in audio, which can use "surround sound" so music will appear to come from the corners of your room, beyond your stereo speakers. And you'll appreciate it in programs like voice recognition, which needs lots of computational muscle and now can be trained in a fraction of the time required on a Pentium II machine.

Why? Remember when you took math and learned about integers--whole numbers like 4 or 57? The Pentium III crunches integers but is also deft at manipulating so-called floating (decimal) points like 123.1256. In fact, the P3 can make floating-point calculations nearly twice as fast as the Pentium II, allowing it to support programs that require incredible precision. Imagine the possibilities when the chip reaches its full gigahertz potential by 2001.

For now, you'll be able to see the difference on the Web, where a bunch of utterly cool stuff is about to blossom. I was at sharperimage.com which is using a plug-in (free software that adds functions to your browser) called 3D Shockwave. When I looked at a picture of a gadget--a portable DVD deck--I could actually rotate the thing 360[degrees] with my mouse. I could also click on the virtual player's buttons and pop open the disc hatch and see the thing work. You'll be able to use this and the other new plug-ins on slower computers, but they won't work as fluidly.

Intel is hoping to capitalize on the Web-worthiness of its chips by launching WebOutfitter, a site that will cater to P3 owners. Intel will also mail owners a CD-ROM with the new plug-ins for free. Perhaps it should include bowling shoes.

E-RRATA: I'd like to congratulate the hundreds of people who won last week's Catch Quittner Err contest--the folks who correctly noted that 3Com's PalmPilot does not run Windows CE, as was stated. Indeed, as someone who owns a Pilot, I know the machine's genius derives from its own operating system, Palm OS. I should have caught the error when it found its way into my copy, but I didn't. However, only four of you noticed the other blooper: the captions under the Sharp Mobilon Pro and Tripad were inadvertently swapped. Shame on you! But thanks for playing... Also, note to Janelle: Yes, that is my real hair in the picture.

Visit our website at time.com to learn more about the new Pentium III computers. Question for Quittner? Try jquit@well.com