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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer who wrote (54116)	4/22/1998 11:18:00 AM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Elmer, re: Celeron/PII confusion I personally think Jeff is right. Intel clearly differentiates between PII and Celeron in their roadmap. Makes sense because I don't think they want the market to associate the low-end Celeron chips with PII. I also agree with Jeff that PII and Celeron are product names defined by marketing. According to Jeff, the common denominator is the P6 architecture. I think he's right on that also. Maybe Paul can clear this up?

To: Elmer who wrote (54116)	4/22/1998 1:27:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Respond to of 186894

Elmer, Tony re: Is it soup yet? or What's in a name... Jeff was mistaken, if that's what he said. The original PPro did not have MMX technology and Celeron does. It's a PII alright. In addition, the PII was not a shrink of the P6, but a completely new layout. Think we had better ask Dell just exactly what he meant as this reasoning won't get you there. Is a Celeron a PII? No, it is not, just because Intel says it is not. "Celeron" is a proper noun - a name like Jim or Bob, or Tony or Elmer. So is "Pentium II". Celeron is different from Pentium II just because Intel chose to say so. Now are Pentium II and Celeron closely related? Smile - I think so. I would say they are cut from the same cloth. The Celeron now has the following "ingredients": 1. Deshutes processor chip in BGA carrier. 2. SEC card The Pentium II (333 to 400) contains all of the above plus: 2. 512Kb L2 cache 3. Plastic case 4. Cool little hologram Pretty close relative wouldn't you say? Too close to assume that Dell meant yes or no to Celeron. So why a new name? Clearly Intel wants its customers to associate names with points along the price/performance curve rather than with the technology inside. (hmm - why does this sound strange?). Future "Celerons" will likely use different die from Pentium II's. Same with servers and workstations. Intel has coined the new name Xeon for these. At first they will be close variants of the Pentium II products - later they may diverge. Jeff ----------------------------------- More on the Pentium II: To restate, The Pentium Pro was/is the marketing name for a product built with the original P6 die and packaged in a ceramic, two cavity package with a custom SRAM L2 cache chip. It was targeted exclusively to servers and workstations due to its lofty price and for the time, highest performance (for Intel Architecture) and exclusive (at the time) multi processor capabilities (again speaking only about IA). Now Intel had a problem. The ceramic packages were externally supplied and cost (estimate) over $45 each! That's right. At one point the packaging was costing more than the P6 die! (again only my speculation). The ceramics suppliers were doing revenue larger than most Intel competitors at the time. Additionally the ceramic production was tapped out - not capable of handling the desktop volume that Intel wanted for P6. Clearly the "multi chip module" was a dead end. Did something new happen? Yes, and it is called "Ball Grid Array", or BGA packaging. The chip is bonded to a one inch square printed circuit board like substrate and covered with an epoxy lid. Traces attach to soldier balls laid out in a grid. These balls are surface mounted to a larger module board. BGA's are great packages. They are extremely cheap, but better electrically and thermally than ceramic. The draw back is that they are soldiered down - cannot be socketed without some sort of attachment to a pinned carrier or an edge connected card. To use BGA with processors clearly a carrier was needed and Intel decided to make a new carrier suitable for the future, something that could safely and coolly dissipate the 100 watt heat of the future gigahertz generation. Intel reengineered P6 for the mass market as follows: 1. Shrunk the die from .6 micron to .35 micron process 2. Doubled the L1 cache size. 3. Added dual pipe MMX unit. 4. Segment register shadows and lots of other tweaks. 5. Added L2 cache and clock control features. The L2 could now be programmed for size and speed. This includes zero L2 size and one half or full L2 access speed. All the above was the Klamath chip project. The added features, mainly the larger L1 did increase the die size to where it is actually a little larger than it's P6 "father". Continuing: 5. Mounted the Klamath die in a BGA package 6. Mounted the Klamath BGA with four SRAM chips and a L2 cache tag chip to printed circuit card with Single Edge Connector (SEC) 7. Added a heat spreader and plastic case. 8. Called the whole thing Pentium II And, by the way, hussled hard enough to make PII the largest selling volume processor in history. ---------- There is a interesting "secret" at Intel - one that is probably more responsible for its outstanding financial performance than any other. I'll let you in on it. The "shrink version" of a processor is not only much faster - but is also much cheaper. In other words the 400MHz Pentium II is cheaper to make than the 233 MHz Pentium II. Keep it a secret as consumers won't like this :) It is the same processor inside Celeron that inside the high speed Pentium II's. This is why Tom of "Tom's Hardware Guide" was able to successfully overclock his Celeron to 400/100. Jeff