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To: jmac who wrote (63173)	8/23/1998 3:17:00 PM
From: VICTORIA GATE, MD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

jmac re<If you have some time, could somebody explain to me the basic differences between the Intel Celeron chip and the Pentium II chip.> Are you the same Jamac we know long time ago ? vg

To: jmac who wrote (63173)	8/28/1998 9:04:00 AM
From: divvie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Celeron vs PII - I noticed that no one had posted a reply so here goes: The PII replaced the P Pro. Both featured on board level 2 cache which is extremely fast memory (SRAM - Static RAM)but very expensive. Without L2 cache most applications are about 30% slower. What happens is that L1 and L2 cache store the most recently used instructions or data and this is where the CPU checks first. If they are not there because they were not used yet or were bigger than the cache size then main memory would have to be accessed, which is much slower. Classic pentiums were sold in PCs with or without L2 cache on the motherboard (60 or 66MHZ). CPQ used to cheat and supply much less efficient asynchronous cache instead of pipelined burst. You had to get atleast 256k of L2 cahce. PPro and PII tried to speed up the process further by moving the L2 cache to the CPU assembly. PPro's cache ran at the CPU's core speed of 180MHz or 200Mhz. This was extremely expensive so PII, when first introduced, did not integrate L2 as tightly and it ran at half the CPU core speed. However the core PII was much improved over PPro and Pentium with better predictive branching and speculative out of order processing, etc. so the speed loss in the half speed L2 was more than made up by the core of PII. Intel also tried to screw AMD and Cyrix by redisigning the chip assemebly to what they called Slot 1 instead of the Pentium's Socket 7. (They patented SLot 1 but NEC licensed the rights to it so Cyrix can now produce Slot 1 CPUs). This slot 1 set up made the CPU assembly much more expensive to produce so when the sub $1000 PC market exploded the on board L2 cache and Slot 1 cartridge made PII too expensive to compete. Hence Celeron was introduced which is simply PII with the L2 cache removed! Without L2 cache the Celeron performed badly in business application tests against AMD and Cyrix and was not much better than classic Pentium. But the PII core has a much better FPU (floating point unit) than AMD or Cyrix - Except AMD K6-2 with 3DNow is supposed to have caught up in floating point math. So, if all you do is play 3D games like Quake or Unreal then Celeron is an extremely cheap geometry engine that can be easily overclocked to 400MHz as lack of L2 cache means that overclocking is easier. But for business apps AMD or Cyrix are fine. Now Mendicino (Code name for 300MHz Celeron) has 128k of L2 cache. This is good but tests show that 256k is the mimimum for meaningful improvements, as common instructions and data in business apps are prolly just less than 256k but bigger than 128k (I'm guessing on that last point, but not on the minimum cahce size). Also Mendicino is becomimg like PII! what's the point? I'm not sure that there will be a reason to buy PII at the same clock speed of Mendicino if the 128k of L2 is really enough. Mendicino could be the best value CPU out there. Even DELL is using it. Latest PII's (Xeon I think) now have L2 cache running at CPU speed so the high end gets better but more expensive to produce.