To: cheryl williamson who wrote (18202 ) 7/26/1999 7:41:00 PM From: QwikSand Respond to
The reason?? Setup costs on a per-processor basis are not that much less for a cheaply made processor than for an expensive one. That's why INTC keeps trying to target its chips ...the P6 core is identical in all of them . (Note: this has changed slightly today because they haven't yet released a Celeron with the newer SIMD instructions or a 100Mhz FSB; Celerons are still Pentium II's...yawn.) The very idea that there can be a 12x price difference to the end user is a bad joke. As far as silicon goes, it's all the same thing. Look at any benchmark that compares the Xeon with a similar Pentium. The difference is 5% no matter what you do (unless Intel runs it themselves in which case suddenly the Xeon looks like a real speed demon); but the chip is 60-70% more money. More importantly, the price/performance gap is similar between a Celeron and a Pentium with the same clock and FSB speeds. Intel is pulling a flat-out scam; and we have no shortage of posters on SI who are buying it.
