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

To: puborectalis who wrote (77363)	3/27/1999 8:45:00 PM
From: Diamond Jim	Respond to of 186894

News March 27, 01:13 Eastern Time Mar. 26, 1999 (InformationWeek - CMP via COMTEX) -- Budget PCs with Intel processors just got faster. Major PC vendors last week started shipping desktops with 433-MHz Celeron chips. The Celeron line now has chips at 333, 366, 400, and 433 MHz. Most vendors have stopped shipping PCs with the 300-MHz Celeron CPU. Intel had originally planned to ship the 433-MHz chip in the third quarter. But the vendor stepped up its production after witnessing how rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has grabbed a large share of the sub-$1,000 PC market. Many Celeron machines, without monitors, start at less than $1,000. Anticipating long-term pressure from AMD, Ron Peck, Intel's director of value PC marketing, describes the competition at the lower end of the market as a "marathon rather than a sprint." Dell is using the 433-MHz Celeron in its OptiPlex G1. Starting at $949, the G1 has 32 Mbytes of RAM, a 4.3-Gbyte hard drive, an integrated 10/100 Ethernet chip, and 2 Mbytes of video memory. Hewlett-Packard offers its corporate Vectra PC with the new chip as well. Starting at $1,257, it has 64 Mbytes of RAM, an 8.4-Gbyte hard drive, and a 24x CD-ROM. Some tests have shown Celeron CPUs' performance to be about equal to Pentium IIs of the same or comparable clock speeds on common applications. But typical Pentium II PC prices are at least 20% to 30% higher than Celeron PC prices. Although Peck expects some large business customers to buy Celeron PCs, he doesn't expect the chip to cannibalize the Pentium II. Most Celeron customers, Peck says, will be small business users and consumers looking for desktops with the best processor speed to price ratio. Not everyone agrees. "Although Intel wants to push the higher-cost items, we've taken the position that Celeron is the best buy for the money" for most business users as well, says Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle. While Peck says only the Pentium II and III offer long-term consistency so several generations of machines can use the same chipset, BIOS, and drivers, Enderle says the Celeron should have as much platform stability as any other processor.