Steve, re: "I understand.. my thinking is that Intel is making a mistake in that they will make a chip that everyone will think is a PII, but the performance won't match up to what people expect."
It's called a degrade, and has been done for 20 years in the larger computer industry. First you come out with the fastest product you can of a new design, to get the product out there. Then, you go in both directions, adding CPU's to get more performance for customers that crave the screaming edge, or, improving cycle time (MHz), or both; and degrade by removing cost for customers that don't need the screamer, implementing a new model number within the same product family. An advantage of the latter, again for customers that don't need top performance, is that they pay less for software licenses from, say, IBM. This doesn't apply to PC's, but, someday, who knows. In any case, a lot of customers will go for the degrade, as long as the price/performance is reasonable. Then, if they need more, they just replace the cartridge with a "regular" PII, give the Celeron to a co-worker, or younger child who doesn't need full strength PII.
Beating this one death.
Tony |