Any engineering insight into the Celeron as far as it truly being a PII? Do they come off the same lines? Is it just a "white box" version of the same processor?
Celeron is a PII core + 128K cache integrated on to a single chip. This is a different die than the PII. Therefore, the chip itself s actually larger and therefore more expensive to produce than a PII.
However, the PII Single Edge Contact (SEC) cartridge adds additional cost that brings the PII to a slightly higher cost than a Celeron. To bring the Celeron cost down more, INTC has eliminated the cartridge completely for the low end offering. Celeron is now available in a 370 pin socket version (not pin compatible with socket 7; ie, Pentium and AMD K6), as well as the SEC cartridge version minus the external cache. The low priced Celerons announced today are the socket version I would imagine.
I realize that the benchmarks are virtually identical and Intc has seemingly gone to some lengths to obscure just how similar these chips are...But are they literally the same chip?
As discussed above they are not the same chip. However, canned benchmarks show the performance of Celeron to roughly equal to PII. Real world performance depends on the app. Gaming apps have shown Celeron to be equal or better than PII. Certain business apps that make heavy use of cache perform better on the PII, hence INTCs positioning it to businesses.
INTC will continue to offer Celeron at slightly lesser clock speeds, and with only a 66Mhz bus, so as not to cannibalize PII. They will move the Celeron to a 100Mhz bus when the PIII is ready with a 133MHZ bus (very soon).
And contrary to Earlie's opinion, businesses will continue to buy mid to end PCs (with these latest PIII processors) just in case that next killer app does appear. The purchasing guys really have nothing at risk buying INTC, so they do it. Its really that simple.
Gary |
