The Pentium III brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile microprocessors based on the sixth-generation Intel P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 26, 1999. The brand's initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded microprocessors. The most notable difference was the addition of the SSE instruction set (to accelerate floating point and parallel calculations), and the introduction of a controversial serial number embedded in the chip during the manufacturing process.

Similarly to the Pentium II it superseded, the Pentium III was also accompanied by the Celeron brand for lower-end CPU versions, and the Xeon for high-end (server and workstation) derivatives. The Pentium III was eventually superseded by the Pentium 4, but its Tualatin core also served as the basis for the Pentium M CPUs, which used many ideas from the Intel P6 microarchitecture. Subsequently, it was the P-M microarchitecture of Pentium M branded CPUs, and not the NetBurst found in Pentium 4 processors, that formed the basis for Intel's energy-efficient Intel Core microarchitecture of CPUs branded Core 2, Pentium Dual-Core, Celeron (Core), and Xeon.

The first Pentium III variant was the Katmai (Intel product code 80525). It was a further development of the Deschutes Pentium II. The only differences were the addition of execution units and the modification of instruction decode and issue logic to support SSE; as well as an improved L1 cache controller - the L2 cache controller was left unchanged, as it would be completely redesigned for Coppermine anyway - which was responsible for the minor performance improvements over the "Deschutes" Pentium IIs.

It was first released at speeds of 450 and 500 MHz. Two more versions were released: 550 MHz on May 17, 1999 and 600 MHz on August 2, 1999. On September 27, 1999 Intel released the 533B and 600B running at 533 & 600 MHz respectively.

The 'B' suffix indicated that it featured a 133 MHz FSB, instead of the 100 MHz FSB of previous models.

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