ANN ARBOR—Approximately 1,450 new Pentium III microprocessors have been donated to the University of Michigan by the Intel Corporation. Known for their speed and powerful performance, the Pentium processors are a welcome gift for PC users on the U-M campuses, according to U-M officials.

The processors are “designed to enable higher counts of advanced lighting—creating amazing 3D effects, providing realistic animation and advanced imaging, great performance capabilities for streaming video, and greater accuracy and faster response time for speech recognition.”

“Intel is dedicated to preparing today’s teachers and students for tomorrow’s demands,” says Mark Abel, a director at Intel, and Intel’s senior sponsor for the U-M. “We must provide access to the latest technology in order for students and teachers to gain a comfort level and to inspire their ability to innovate, to create, to look to the future.”

“We are delighted with the prospect of adding one of the fastest desktop processors currently available to compatible machines on our campuses,” says Jos?-Marie Griffiths, University chief information officer. “We are especially pleased that with the Pentium III’s performance rating, we will be better prepared for multi-media applications being developed for the next generation Internet. We’re appreciative of Intel’s gift.” The total value of the donation is more than $600,000.

The availability of the processors was announced by Griffiths to the Information Technology Federation Executive group that represents the information technology areas for the University’s three campuses—Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn. The individual schools, colleges, and administrative units were asked to respond by a deadline with the number of processors each area would need to upgrade existing equipment.

“We are very grateful for the donation from Intel,” said Thomas Hacker, systems project coordinator for the U-M’s Media Union and Center for Parallel Computing. “We intend to use them for virtual reality and visualization efforts, as well as innovative high performance computing usage.”

While the processors require installation and are donated for University use only, the Office of the Chief Information Officer received more than 1,768 requests. All requests received by the deadline were honored. The processors were distributed to more than 40 departments and units in varying numbers.

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