> I realize that this subject has been discussed before, but at that
> time i wasn't in need of building a new computor. Would appreciate
> it if it could be explained what the differences are between all
> the different cpu's on the market today, Thunderbird, Athlon, Duron,
> (which I realize are AMD) the pentium chips (III & IV), celeron,
> coppermine, etc.

  This is like asking what's the difference between all the different
cars on the market.  In each case, you have the current "top of the
line" (P3, Tbird), last year's model (PIII, Athlon), and the economy
model (Celeron, Duron).  Some prefer Toyota and some prefer VW/Audi.
  The name that doesn't fit with the rest is "Coppermine".  This was
Intel's development codename for a change in chip technology, which I
believe was introduced during the PIII timeframe; new voltage
characteristics mean that some older PII/PIII motherboards do not
support late-model PIIIs.


> My system will be used for small business applications, which
> include extensive internet useage, spreadsheets, databases, some
> number crunching, web page design and of course wordprocessing. I
> also will be running the "seti" program in the background.

  Any of these CPUs will run all of this software; some of them will
run the "number crunching" and "seti" tasks faster.  (They'll
probably run everything a bit faster, but these are the two
applications where the difference is likely to be noticable.)

David Gillett

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