Re: Pentium vs Celeron

From: cquirke (MVP Win9x) (cquirkenews_at_nospam.mvps.org)
Date: 05/11/04 

Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 01:23:22 +0200

On Tue, 11 May 2004 11:06:06 -0500, "Jim Macklin"

>There are several different CPU that can be called Celeron
>as well as several variations of P4 CPUs.

Ah, at last someone has a clue ;-)

>In old original Celerons, many features the would present in
>a P3 (later P4) were left out and they had about half the
>cache as the "better" CPUs. Also, Intel locked them at 66
>MHz so they would always be slower.

>New Celerons and P4 are socket 470 and the only difference
>is that P4s run at 400,533 or 800 FSB depending on what
>model P4 and Celerons are locked 400 FSB and they still have
>half the cache.
>See www.Intel.com to get details.

You would do better to buy a PC that doesn't suck (e.g. full ATX not
Micro ATX, 120G HD not 40G, 17" not 15" monitor, a motherboard with a
chipset that doesn't suck and that has an AGP slot on it) with a
Celeron processor than the usual shoe-scrapings plus "Pentium Tax".

Might cost you less, too; Pentium Tax is heavy - basically a margin
bonanza for Intel, given the chips cost about the same to make.

As Jim says (or rather implies); "Pentium" and "Celeron" are marketing
terms (brand names), not processor specifications - and often this
month's Celeron is same or better spec than last quarter's "Pentium",
even at the same MHz or GHz. Here's how it's gone over the years...

1) 512k half-speed L2 cache, 66MHz base
2) 512k half-speed L2 cache, 100MHz base
3) zero L2 cache, 66MHz base
4) 512k half-speed L2 cache, 100MHz base, SIMD
5) 128k full-speed L2 cache, 66MHz base
6) 256k full-speed L2 cache, 100MHz base, SIMD
7) 128k full-speed L2 cache, 100MHz base, SIMD
8) 256k full-speed L2 cache, 133MHz base, SIMD
9) 256k full-speed L2 cache, 400MHz base, SIMD
A) 128k full-speed L2 cache, 400MHz base, SIMD
B) 512k full-speed L2 cache, 400MHz base, SIMD
C) 512k full-speed L2 cache, 533MHz base, SIMD
D) 512k full-speed L2 cache, 800MHz base, SIMD, HT

...can you guess what these were branded as?

Pentium II: (1), (2)
Pentium III: (4), (6), (8)
Pentium IV: (9), (B), (C), (D)
Celeron: (3), (5), (7), (A)

Notice how when PII gets SIMD, it's heralded as a change worthy of
renaming to PIII, but there wasn't even an announcement when Celeron
got SIMD. At one time, you could buy (4), (6) and (8) all at the same
time, all priced the same for a given MHz, all sold under the same
"Pentium III" brand name, while Celeron was considerably cheaper.

The same thing's happening now with "Pentium 4"; even just a few
months ago, you could pay "Pentium Tax" and get stuck with (9) instead
of (D) at a similar price, while (A) is way cheaper because it's
"Celeron". Is the performance gap between (A) and (9) greater than
that between (9) and (D)? I doubt it, somehow.

The original Celeron was (3) and that truly sucked - the Covington
"cacheless wonder" Celeron-266 and -300 ran like the previous
generation Pentium-200 and -233. Covington was an emergency stop-gap
to appease Compaq, and was intended to run for 18 months or so before
Menocino (5) was due to be released - but Intel debuted Mendocino
after 9 months, driven as they were by market forces.

Mendocino's faster L2 cache proceeded to whip the older Pentium II,
prompting the move from (1) to (6).

>---------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
   Certainty may be your biggest weakness
>---------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Pentium vs Celeron
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  • Re: Pentium vs Celeron
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    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
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