Fred - Mendocino/Celeron Plans for Intel
Look for Intel to launch the Mendocino around August 24 - with several hundred thousand Mendocinos shipping around that time.
The article is below.
Paul
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techweb.com
July 12, 1998, Issue: 798
Section: NEWS
Celeron Family Grows To Four Cpus
Joseph F. Kovar
Santa Clara, Calif. - Intel Corp.'s Celeron family of CPUs soon will grow to four models when the chip maker releases two of its Mendocino series processors later this quarter.
The company will release 300MHz and 333MHz Mendocino chips with on-die 128 Kbytes of Level 2 cache, a spokesman said.
The Santa Clara-based company also will continue to ship the 266MHz and 300MHz Celeron CPUs with no Level 2 cache. The company refused to discuss the release date or pricing for the Mendocino chip.
While Intel claims the performance of Mendocino significantly will improve with the on-die cache, actual performance will vary according to application, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for microprocessor and core logic at market-research firm Dataquest, San Jose, Calif.
Cache does not have much effect on performance for applications such as MPEG and multimedia but can help boost performance 20 percent to 30 percent in word-processing or spreadsheet applications, said Brookwood.
It is harder to compare Mendocino and the Pentium II, Brookwood said. The Pentium II has a 512 Kbytes of Level 2 cache, four times larger than the Mendocino processor. But the Pentium II's external Level 2 cache runs at half
the CPU's clock speed, while Mendocino on-die Level 2 cache runs at full CPU speed.
"If the Mendocino finds what it needs in its [smaller on-board] cache, it wins in speed," Brookwood said. "But the Pentium II, once it looks in cache, is more likely to get what it's looking for."
The net result is the 333MHz Mendocino will leave a cacheless Celeron in the dust, Brookwood said. It will be close to the 233MHz and 266MHz Pentium IIs in performance.
Brookwood said he expects the 333MHz Mendocino to cost just less than $200, compared with about $110 for the 300MHz version. "They have to fit in between the Covington Celeron at the low end and the Pentium IIs, which will
start at about $200," he said.
Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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