> This "new" Pentium II reduces costs by doing away with the L2 cache
> altogether! I guess it would eliminate the potential problems of
> "too much" memory to cache -- no caching at all! But at what
> performance cost? The May issue of PC World was not too keen on this
> new Pentium II, the Celeron. In addition, it appears to be a "dead
> end." Reports are that you will not be able to upgrade from the
> Celeron to a "full" Pentium II without changing motherboards. Intel

        That only applies if a person is stupid enough to buy an EX chipset board
with their Celeron, the Celeron works very well on both LX and BX chipset
boards, the latter of which can except up to a PII 400, and above.

> is trying very hard to move everyone to Slot 1 and 2 to eliminate AMD
> and Cyrix and any other pretenders to the Socket 7 throne they
> vacated. Reminds me of the step back Intel made with the crippled
> 386SX chip.

        The 386SX chip was not crippled, it was the same situation as with the
8088. Intel developed the 8086, a 16 bit internal and external processor,
but then they realized that there were very few 16bit support components,
but tons of 8 bit, so to make it cheaper to purchase a system, they
developed the 8088 (and later the 80188, although that never caught
attention), a 16 bit internal 8 bit external interface CPU. With the 386 it
was the same story, Intel developed a great powerful and fast 32 bit
processor with very little 32 bit component support out there, so they
developed the SX, an internal 32 bit external 16 bit CPU. It made economic
sense, and was not an attempt to oust the competition, there practically was
none. TTYL