Hi Frank:
Intel should re-evaluate the Celeron, which is slow
Regarding the AMD vs. Celeron, I recently did some research on the two processors plus the Pentium II. First off, I have found that retail computers that have the AMD processor tend (not always, of course) to have low quality / performance components involved. I have not seen numbers to back this up (I haven't really looked, either, for that matter), but I do have personal hands on experience using both. For business application "power users" such as my self, the AMD has two more significant performance lapses. The AMD tends to run very "hot", which causes the computer to be susceptible to more crashes and makes the pc virtually impossible to "overclock". Overclocking, if you don't know, is the processes of speeding up the Bus speed of the system so that the CPU can run at speeds in excess of it's standard speed. The side effect of overclocking is that the CPU gets much more hot, requiring extra cooling procedures. The AMD cannot be overclocked because it already runs too hot. The second disadvantage of the AMD is that it's Level 2 cache (512K) runs at only half the clock speed of the CPU itself, like the Pentium II.
The Celeron only has 128K cache, but the cache runs at the same speed as the CPU itself. In fact, I read a PC Week article that contains lab results showing that this speed advantage that the Celeron has overcomes its lower cache size and does run faster. The second benefit to the Celeron is that it is extremely stable and runs nice and cool, which pleases overclockers. For example, you can buy a $100 Celeron 333 and overclock it to 500 Mhz and a 100 Mhz Bus and still have a stable computer (if it doesn't run Windows 9X, at least ;o) !!
With these facts in mind, I ordered myself a new Micron yesterday off their web site with a 400 Mhz Celeron. I had been looking at Pentium II's and AMD K6's, but in the end the Celeron made more sense for me.
Just my personal experience...
Justin
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