April 20, 1998, TechWeb News
Will Celeron Sell? Stores Are Skeptical -- Intel's
Entry-Level Chip Gets Lukewarm Response
By Greg Quick & Aaron Ricadela
San Francisco - Stung by a lack of interest from PC makers in its newly
released Celeron chip, Intel may face an even higher hurdle: U.S. retailers are
worried the cache-less Pentium IIs will befuddle customers.
Pointing to the plethora of 266MHz chips now available (PII, Celeron, and
AMD's), Rex Leetham, office products buyer for R.C. Willey Home
Furnishings, Salt Lake City, said last week: "I have a responsibility to provide
my customers with the best performance they can afford, and I don't think
Celeron does that. Any time we confuse consumers, we all lose sales."
"I have not talked to any vendors who are really excited about Celeron," said
a buyer for a retail chain, who asked not to be named. "They may do it
because they want to be in that price point. But it's gotten so much bad press,
that I think they're being conservative in their build estimates."
Analysts agreed. "Intel will cause nothing but problems by introducing
Celeron," said Kim Brown, vice president of Dataquest's systems group.
Tests by Dataquest, a San Jose, Calif., research firm, show the chip does not
meet the performance level of a 233MHz Pentium.
Retailers and manufacturers stressed that Intel must wage a full-scale
educational campaign to make customers aware of Celeron's features and
capabilities and to differentiate the chip from other Intel and AMD 266MHz
processors available.
A sales associate for a Fry's Electronics in the San Francisco Bay area
confessed that, if asked, he would not be able to tell customers the
advantages of a Celeron system. He said store personnel need training and
more information to convey Intel's message to customers.
A sales rep for another major retailer conceded he had only the barest
understanding of Celeron and had no idea which OEMs planned to ship
systems based on the processor.
Intel is positioning the chip as a replacement for the Pentium MMX line at its
entry level. The chip-maker has been criticized for removing Celeron's level 2
cache, which is expected to reappear in later versions of the chip. Level 2
cache is connected via a bus that runs at half the speed of the processor's
clock and is located close to the processor, so data can be shipped rapidly
between the two components.
Michael Warner, director of purchasing for Datel Computer Center in San
Diego, Calif, believes Celeron-based systems will appeal to the most
price-driven consumers. "We're going to let people know it has some
shortcomings, but we will have to stock it. People will come in with a flyer
and a price point, and they don't want to hear our technical arguments. We've
always tried to recommend the best technology that people will be happy
with for a long time. But Celeron makes it tough to do that."
Intel maintains that Celeron is better than its predecessors. "It is superior to
the Pentium in every way. [It] does all of tasks that people do [on a PC]
today and has headroom for the future," said Paul Otellini, executive vice
president, Intel Architecture business group.
An Intel spokesman said that the chip performed 25 percent better than the
Pentium with MMX in floating-point performance, and 17 percent better on
multimedia functions. He also pointed out that most sub-$1,000 systems run
on Pentium-with-MMX processors, and none of them has level 2 cache.
Only seven manufacturers-Compaq, Dell, IBM, Pionex, Packard Bell, NEC
and Hewlett-Packard-turned up at Intel's introduction of the Celeron family
last week to demonstrate business and consumer systems, and many of their
booths were manned by Intel representatives.
Intel said more announcements are coming soon. "There are 40 OEMs
worldwide committing, including a who's-who in retail computing," Otellini
said.
Intel expects systems from all 40 to be available in June, some priced as low
as $899, a company spokeswoman said.
Not all retailers were dim on Celeron's prospects. CompUSA and Global
DirectMail, under its MidWest Micro brand, have announced that they will
offer Celeron-based systems.
An Acer America spokesman said Intel has "a big challenge" in
communicating the advantages of Celeron to the market.
An executive for another vendor said his company will wait until the messages
are conveyed and the confusion subsides before it releases any
Celeron-based PCs.
"We want the message to be out before the computers, not vice-versa," he
said.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
