On 10 Aug 98 at 10:02, Roberto Safora wrote:

> I heard there is a CPU between P MMX and P II. Its name is something like
> CELERON (please, remember I HEARD of it).
> Would some body send a comparison of Celeron with the others. Take in
> account price also.

  P MMX exists in a world called "Socket 7".  PII and Celeron exist
in a world called "Slot 1".  [There's also Pentium Pro, in the
"Socket 8" world.]
  Intel has discontinued all of its "Socket 7" production.  AMD,
Cyrix, and IDT all have chips for this market.

  A Celeron is a PII, with some specific adjustments to keep the
price down:

1.  A finer process (.25 micron) increases the number of CPUs made
from each wafer -- many manufacturing costs get spread across more
units.  [This should also lower power consumption and cooling
requirements....]

2. (a) In the PII, the CPU and L2 cache are on separate "chips"
within the "CPU package"; there is assembly cost associated with
this.  Future Celerons will combine cache and CPU onto a single chip,
for reduced cost.
   (b) You cannot buy these Celerons with integrated cache yet.  At
the moment, the only Celerons available have no L2 cache, and no way
to add any.  How badly this hurts performance will depend on the mix
of software being run.[*]

[*] This is at least the fourth time that Intel have introduced a new
chip that was a step *down*, in an attempt to protect margins on its
current top of the line.  The 8088 was a big success; the 386SX and
486SX were less so.

  Reaction to Celeron has been mixed -- people who run chips beyond
their certififed bounds have generally found that without a cache,
the Celeron can be pushed faster than many other chips, and the price
is getting to be quite reasonable -- US$100 neighborhood.

David G