SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Improved production yields with its 0.25-micron process technology will allow Intel Corp. to introduce its Katmai Pentium II processor ahead of schedule, and to add a 300-MHz version of its Celeron processor with integrated L2 cache to its 1998 processor road map, the company said.

The 400-MHz and 500-MHz Pentium II Katmai processors, which include 70 new SIMD floating-point instructions, will now be introduced by the first quarter of 1999, rather than by the second quarter as previously planned. The processors are expected to be used in combination with Intel's 440BX chip sets, which support 133-MHz AGP and a 100-MHz system bus.

In another modification of its road map, Intel plans to introduce a 300-MHz version of its Celeron processor — which integrates 128-kbytes of L2 cache — by the fourth quarter of 1998. The company had planned to introduce its first Celeron, code-named Mendocino, at 333 MHz. Intel is still on track to introducing the faster version of the processor by the end of the year, an Intel spokeswoman said.

On the server front, Intel has confirmed its intention to offer its "Tanner" processor by the first quarter of 1999. Tanner will include the Katmai SIMD instruction set, will include 512 kbytes of cache, and run at 500 MHz. And in the coming weeks, Intel will offer its first Slot-2 processor, named Xeon, which will run at 400 MHz and include 512-kbytes of cache. A 450-MHz version with cache options of 2 Mbyte, 1 Mbyte or 512 kbyte will be offered in the second half of 1999.