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January 2001 sees the latest installment of the nearly three year old saga which is known as the Intel Celeron. The Celeron processor certainly has had mixed fortunes since its original arrival in April 1998, with the chip moving from disaster (the original cacheless “Covington”) to Pentium II beater (the “Mendocino”) and relative mediocrity with last years 0.18 micron Celeron. Whilst in late 1998 and throughout 1999 the Celeron was a bargain power-chip, it became ever more apparent that there was one factor holding it back; Intel’s insistance that it ran on a 66 MHz Front Side Bus. Why was this? Well Intel was stung by the success of the “Mendocino” Celeron (300A to 533) which was every bit as powerful as its larger, and more expensive Pentium II and III branded siblings. This fact became known and thus the budget oriented Celeron processor began to win sales from the Pentium II and Pentium III processor ranges. For a chip that was designed to fend off the threat of the AMD K6-2, Intel had found that it had just gone a bit too far and had hurt itself in the process. Determined to avoid a repeat of this situation, Intel launched its 0.18 micron based Celeron processor with a 66 MHz Front Side Bus in early 2000. By then though, the 66 MHz bus was insufficient for the needs of modern power-computing and so crippled the performance of the new Celeron. Whilst speeds scaled from 533 MHz up to 766 MHz, the new Celeron did not demonstrate a significant power increase due to this limitation. Intel had at last made the Celeron inferior to the Pentium III, but had not made it slow enough for people and PC manufacturer to avoid it (as with the “Covington” in 1998). If fact the 0.18 micron Celeron was an able chip, but with the wrong bus speed. This situation would have been tolerable for Intel, had not its main rival AMD launched a the budget Duron processor which used the same 200 MHz (100 MHz DDR) Front Side Bus as the high-end Athlon processor. It became immediately apparent that the Celeron was no-longer the budget processor of choice as the AMD Duron offered performance comparable to that of the Pentium III processor. As a response to this, Intel had had to make the decision that it has put off for nearly two years, and move the Celeron processor to a 100 MHz Front Side Bus. Intel Celeron 800, What's new?Overall, the only new features that the Celeron 800 offers are, a higher clock speed as compared to previous Celeron processors and the addition of a 100 MHz Front Side Bus. Other than these new features, the Celeron 800 is identical to any other 0.18 micron based Celeron in existence. Like other 0.18 micron Celeron processors produced, the Celeron 800 is still manufactured by selecting low-yield “Coppermine” Pentium III processors which have bad cache blocks and disabling 128 KB of them. This leaves the Celeron with only 128 KB Level 2 cache as opposed to the 256 KB of the Pentium III. As Intel disables up to half of the cache on the Pentium III to make the Celeron and this reduces the chip to only having a 4-way associative cache instead of an 8-way associative cache as on the Pentium III. Like the Pentium III, the Celeron’s cache is 256 bit. As with all other P6 based designs, the new Celeron only features 32 KB of Level 1 cache. The specification of the Celeron 800 include:
Other Intel Processors at:
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