Posted 27/04/99 11:54am by Peter Sherriff
Celeron trashes PII in new RegMark™ tests
Celeron delivers five more Bangs Per Buck than PII
The Celeron is Intel's best processor right now. The embarrassment of the
original Covington's lack of performance panicked Chipzilla into rushing
out the far-superior Mendocino version complete with on-die L2 cache.
This certainly did the trick as far as addressing the performance
shortcomings of the tragic non-cached part, but also posed a serious
threat to the Celeron's big brother, Pentium II.
Intel blindly threw all its considerable marketing might behind Celeron in a
bid to stomp on upstarts AMD and Cyrix in the sub $1,000 market, and at
the same time took its eye off the ball with the cash cow Pentium II. The
result is that despite Intel's continued protestations that Celeron isn't
making much of an impact in corporate space, little Celeron is, in fact,
blowing PII into the weeds.
While this is great news for Celeron, it's not quite so clever for Chipzilla
itself.
The margins on PII parts are several orders of magnitude greater than on
Celerons, even given that the PII is far more costly to fabricate - buying in
and then soldering separate L2 cache chips onto the processor
daughterboard and putting the whole thing into a shiny black cartridge all
add $$$s to manufacturing costs.
So how does Intel protect the PII against this onslaught and protect its
margins?
Terribly difficult
Simple. By making it terribly difficult to compare directly the performance
of the budget Celeron with the mainstream Pentium II. Corporates can
continue to buy the upmarket and expensive PII and get a nice warm
feeling that they're getting a premium product at a premium price.
They ain't.
Even though Celeron has only a quarter of the L2 cache of its big brother,
because it's on the same piece of silicon, it can run at the full core speed
as the CPU. And 128K running at 400MHz is more than a match for 512K
running at 200MHz in all but a very few instances such as the enormous
spreadsheets Chipzilla uses to calculate its profits.
Intel posts pretty performance graphs for Celeron and Pentium II, but
rather neatly only compares Celerons with Celerons and PIIs with PIIs in
anodyne overall performance terms.
In fact it took some considerable browsing to discover any numbers which
could be used to compare the two ranges.
The Register is the first to admit that the comparison below is far from
scientific, but in the absence of Intel having the guts to publish
performance figures for its entire range, on one graph, it's the best you'll
get.
The only other figure we could find to compare the two was the price.
Source: Intel benchmarks
Even more simplistically, if we take the Celerons and PIIs and divide their FPU
mark score by their price, we get the new RegMark™ 99 Bangs Per Buck score.
RegMark™ Bangs Per Buck Celeron vs Pentium II
We think the figures speak for themselves. ®
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