The history of the Intel Celeron processor has been one of dramatic contrasts. The original Celeron processor released in April 1998 was merely a Pentium II processor with the level 2 cache chips removed to reduce costs. This impeded performance in many business applications to such a degree that the Intel Celeron processor gained a rather bad reputation.

Intel knew that the original Celeron processor was a sub-standard product and so released a vastly improved Celeron based upon the "Mendocino" processor core which integrated 128 Kb of level 2 cache running at full clock speed. This chip instantly turned around the performance issues of the Celeron processor, making it the best price/performance ratio processor on the market for well over a year. This chip went from 300 MHz all the way up to 533 MHz and claimed back much of the budget PC market from the AMD K6-2.

With the Celeron based upon the 0.25 micron process "Mendocino" core now being 18 months old, it has become the time for Intel to replace it with a new Celeron processor based upon the 0.18 micron process which is found with the "Coppermine" Pentium III processor. What though does this new Celeron processor bring to you the consumer, well to find out, read on.

Intel Celeron 566 & 600, What's new?

The Celeron 566 & 600 (known across the internet PC hardware community as "Celeron II") is an all new Celeron processor, being far closer to the "Coppermine" Pentium III processor than it is to the outgoing Celeron processor. Essentially the new Celeron is a "Coppermine" Pentium III processor, with only 128 Kb of the 256 Kb level 2 cache enabled on the processor core. The new Celeron also differs from the Pentium III in that it still only runs on a 66 MHz Front Side bus like all previous members of the Celeron family.

The features of the 0.18 micron Celeron include:

• 0.18 micron manufacturing process.
  
  
• Plip Chip Pin Grid Array (FC-PGA) packaging.
  
  
• Intel's Advanced Transfer cache design (128 Kb).
  
  
• Streaming SIMD instructions.
  
  
• 1.50v core voltage.
  
  
• 66 MHz Front Side Bus.
  
  
• 32 Kb Level 1 cache.

Many of the new features of the 0.18 micron Celeron affect it's performance (and one of the old features too), which we will now discuss.

Celeron 533.

Celeron 566/600 - Page 2.

Other Intel Processors at:

• Intel Pentium
• Intel Pentium MMX
• Intel Pentium Pro
• Intel Pentium II
• Intel Pentium III
• Intel Pentium II/III Xeon