McMannis - "Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are among the PC vendors that later this month will offer corporate computers based on Intel's Celeron-300A and Celeron-333 CPUs. These machines will
offer a number of business-oriented features. 300-MHz or 333-MHz processors "
Your Celery Stick may be the big hit of the Fall Fashion season !
You can read more below.
Paul
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infoworld.com
August 10, 1998 (Vol. 20, Issue 32)
Celeron PCs gain corporate features in $1K price range
Systems get management, L2 cache
By Andy Santoni
With a boost in performance and corporate features such as Wired for Management, low-cost PCs coming later this month will make it even more difficult to justify redesigning networks to use
network computers (NCs), industry observers said.
With Intel's pending introduction on Aug. 24 of Celeron processors with on-chip cache, computer makers will be able to offer systems that sell for less than $1,000 yet provide performance that is more than adequate for most corporate applications.
Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and other suppliers have already introduced low-cost systems that use Intel's Celeron processor. However, this version of the Celeron CPU, known as "Covington," lacks
Level 2 (L2) cache memory, which significantly degrades performance.
The "Mendocino" Celeron chips, coming out this month, have 128KB of on-chip L2 cache that runs at the speed of the processor. Pentium II CPUs, in contrast, have twice as much cache running at half the speed of the processor.
The higher-performance Celeron processors will demand a small price premium over their predecessors. According to sources, the Celeron-333 will sell for just less than $200, and the Celeron-300A will be priced at about $150. Today's Celeron-300 is priced at $112 and the
Celeron-266 is priced at $86.
Compounding the difficult competitive position of NCs, suppliers have been late delivering hardware, said Tony Massimini, a technology analyst at Semico Research, in Phoenix. Suppliers were successful in convincing users that there is a need for such devices, but that they haven't been able to fill the need.
"I didn't think it was a good idea from the start," Massimini said.
Too much of the hype around NCs focused around being anti-"Wintel" -- displacing Intel processors and Microsoft operating systems, Massimini noted. But as NC makers shifted designs toward Intel CPUs, that differentiation disappeared, he said.
For a few hundred dollars more than the price of an NC, IT managers will be able to buy PCs with features such as Wired for Management capabilities, Massimini noted.
Unlike NCs, these machines fit into existing network infrastructures, giving administrators a single platform -- the Intel architecture -- that scales from basic PCs to high-performance workstations and
even servers, according to Intel.
That appeals to Brian Bretz, an information planning analyst at Helix Health, in Baltimore. After studying NCs, he stayed with PCs because the products were more mature. In medical applications, a single point of failure leaves the network open to catastrophic problems, he noted.
"Even the base PC has a lot more resources than we use," Bretz said. Instead of changing to a thin-client infrastructure, Bretz trickles down older machines to less rigorous applications such as data entry. Also, the price difference between new, lost-cost PCs and NCs is relatively small, Bretz
added.
Gordon Schillinger, a network systems manager at Washington Corrections Center, in Shelton, Wash., does the same.
"We try to exploit whatever we can out of our old systems," Schillinger said.
Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., can be reached at (800) 628-8686 or intel.com.
Intel's next Celeron chip upgrade aims to cut off the market for network computers.
Corporate Celeron PCs
Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are among the PC vendors that later this month will offer
corporate computers based on Intel's Celeron-300A and Celeron-333 CPUs. These machines will
offer a number of business-oriented features.
300-MHz or 333-MHz processors
32MB to 64MB of RAM
2GB to 4GB hard drives
Wired for Management capabilities
LAN interfaces
Prices as low as $1,000 |
