WHY CELERON?

Inititally Intel offered the Celeron 266 and Celeron 300, both not exactly loved by the press or public. Those two ‘old’ Celerons use the well known ‘Deschutes’ core that’s also found in Pentium II and Pentium II Xeon processors. The Pentium II teams it up with two ‘BSRAM’ half speed 2nd level cache chips while the Xeon is running this core together with a full speed ‘CSRAM’ .

The old Celeron however had to run the ‘Deschutes’ core without any 2nd level cache, thus making the product significantly cheaper than the two brothers while lowering the office application performance compared to Pentium II and Xeon significantly too. The 3D gaming performance of the old Celeron however was pretty impressive, making this CPU an excellent and inexpensive multi media solution for home users.

There are still a huge number of users out there who combine ‘bad performance’ with the name ‘Celeron’, generated by a vast amount of publications who only looked at office performance, ignoring the 3D and FPU performance at the same time.

The new Celeron is completely different. The Celeron 300A and the Celeron 333 comes now with an internal on-die 2nd level cache of 128 kB, which is even running at CPU clock frequency and thus faster than the 2nd level cache of a Pentium II running at only half the CPU clock frequency.

This accelerates the new Celerons to a speed that’s virtually identical to the speed of Pentium II CPUs at the same clock speed. Office applications, 3D games and even 3D rendering programs hardly show any difference between 512 kB 2nd level cache running at half the CPU clock or 128 kB 2nd level cache running at CPU clock. There may be some software that takes particular advantage of the larger L2 cache of the Pentium II but at the same time there may be software that takes advantage of the faster L2 cache of the new Celerons.

The new Celerons on a BX chipset motherboard offer excellent performance and growth potential... That's WHY CELERON!