Intel Introduces New Celeron nytimes.com
Off topic, of course. I must say at the outset, again, that I don't hold Microsoft's Wintel co-conspirator in the same high esteem, they got good engineering, and they're willing to let their lawyers deal with their legal problems without pulling the whining crybaby sore winner act, about how the world will go up in flames if the nasty feds don't leave them alone.
I don't know if there's anybody out there reading my, uh, broader interest postings anymore, but there's a very interesting story buried here. On the cheap PC front, I was with the press concensus on the general lameness of the original Celeron, and "the market", whatever that means, seems to more or less agree, with AMD now holding something like 50% of the low end. But, there's one place the Celeriac has found a home. The Tom's hardware page hot-rod overclocking club loves the little bugger. Runs quake like a bat out of hell, especially when you OC it to 450 mhz or so, at 112mhz mem bus speed. At that speed, it's even ok for vanilla business use. This voids your warranty, blah blah, but it's a $100 part- who cares.
Now, we have CeleriacII, and it gets even more interesting.
Intel is charging PC makers $149 for Celerons running at 300 MHz and $192 for the 333 MHz version, far lower than Intel traditionally starts prices for new chips. The original Celeron processors, with clock speeds of 266 and 300 MHz, also will continue to be sold.
At the top end of the market, Intel unveiled a new Pentium II 450 MHz microprocessor intended for business desktop systems. It should outperform the 400 MHz version -- the previous top speed -- by up to 10 percent, Intel said.
The chip costs manufacturers $669, which should help shore up Intel's profit margins as the company and the rest of the semiconductor industry adapts to lower-cost PCs.
That's a trend that's expected to continue. Entry-level PCs dropped below the $1,000 price barrier only 18 months ago and are now even cheaper now as consumers favor bargain computing over gee-whiz technology. Several companies now sell PCs for $400 or $500, not including monitors, which start at about $150.
I'm getting the feeling the market for "business desktop systems" is pretty dumb. The only thing that seems to tax Cheap PC's is 3d gaming, and who wants their office staff messing with Quake at 100 frames/sec? Of course, Intel has this baroque roadmap going off in at least 3 different directions, trying to keep high margins in the face of the el-cheapo onslaught. See tomshardware.com for Tom's somewhat amused take. And Intel's doing its best to make the el-cheapo Celeron look lame enough so the sage "business market" will go for $669 PII's instead of the Celeriac. From necxdirect.necx.com
This processor will require motherboards with a special Celeron retention mechanism, different from that used with the Pentium II, that secures the processor in the slot to prevent shock and vibration damage. The heatsink fan is also different from previous models, requiring power from a 3-pin power header from the motherboard.
Plus, it's rated for a 66mhz FSB, and has the locked CPU clock multiplier that's de riguer these days. An attempt to keep the little sucker stuck in the low-price ghetto.
But they all come off the same line, you know, and Intel's good engineering won't let the cripple effect go too deep. People seem to have no trouble running late Pentium MMX's at super-7 bus speeds, and OC crowd had no choice but to OC the original Celeron by upping the FSB speed to the (unsupported) 100 mhz or better. Same thing works for the "Celeron A", and our intrepet correspondent Tom Pabst is first on the scene. The preliminary story is at tomshardware.com , but the really interesting part is at tomshardware.com, where the $150 "mendicino" Celeron A with 128k on-chip cache, OC'd to 450/100, outruns the new $669 PII 450. At least on Business Winstone98, 31.7 vs. 31.4. Of course, if you run the new Celeron at the rated speed, you're back in K6 territory, around 25, but Intel's not going to build a special low-speed fab to hold the OC crowd in check. It's the same P6 core as in the official 450 PII, but the cache works better. It's hard to get the off-chip SRAM to run at half the speed of the on-chip l2 cache.
Now, what would really be cool is if somebody build a socket7-style MB with 1-2 mbytes of static ram cache on it to use with the new Celeron. I'm sure Intel will never sell a chipset that can handle that, but Via's got clearance to sell a P6 chipset now. It took them a while to get the MVP3 shaken out, but it seems to be doing well these days. There's this issue of cache control lines coming off the CPU, but I don't understand why, in a uniprocessor system, you couldn't make the motherboard cache totally transparent to the CPU.
Cheers, Dan. |
