Intel Celerons

dahamsta

Can someone tell me what a Celeron 1.3GHZ is the equivalent of? They're just Pentiums with smaller on-boards caches, aren't they?

adam

GoneShootin

The Celeron chip is based on a Pentium II core while Pentium III chips are based, as you would expect, on a Pentium III core. The Pentium III core contains an enhanced instruction set and has some pipelining improvements that give it slightly better performance on normal instructions. The enhanced instruction set is only useful to programs specially coded to take advantage of it, and there aren't yet that many that do.

The Pentium III uses a separate chip for its processor cache, while the Celeron has on-chip cache. This means that the Celeron has one quarter the amount of cache of most Pentium IIIs, but the Celeron's cache runs twice as fast. The first Celerons had no cache and this hurt their performance and gave them bad reviews early-on.

Intel manufactures Pentium III chips that run at higher clock speeds than Celeron chips. For example, the fastest Pentium IIIs might be 200 MHz (40%) faster than the fastest Celeron chips.
Some Pentium III chips support faster system bus speeds than Celeron chips do.


from how stuff works

Gerry

Gone Shootin, intel change the celeron as their manufacturing processes change.

The celeron 1.0A - 1.3A is based on the 0.13 micron tualatin core, with 256k of cache.

So it is as fast as a 1.3ghz pentium III coppermine. Of course in applications it will be a little slower than expected, because it is only running on a 100mhz bus, as opposed to the 133mhz bus of the high end p3 coppermines.

It is roughly as fast as a low end p4 ( 1.4 - 1.5 ghz )

( The p4 does much less work per clock cycle )

Best bet is to get a 1.1 or a 1.2 and run the bus at 133, for a really fast machine.

GoneShootin

did not know that

i bow before you

dahamsta

Thanks boys. A follow-up question: Would a Celeron-powered server be a Bad Thing or is it just another matter for consideration? I'm not talking about be-all, end-all performance here, I'm talking about solidity and reliability. The machine has to be rock-solid, and it has to be able to handle irregular but quite heavy bursts of activity.

Cheers,
adam

Gerry

If you use a board with an intel i815 chipset, the machine will be solid as a rock. You have to make sure that the board has the latest version of the 815 chipset, it will say tualatin compatible somewhere on it anyway.

This server would not be super fast, but would be able to handle heavy loads without falling over. The one caveat with the i815 is that it can only handle 512mb of ram, but presumably this server is not powering www.amazon.com in any case.

dahamsta

Dunno about the chipset, cos I'll never see the machine, but I guess I can ask. No, the machine won't be running Amazon, or anything like it. Nice to think ahead though.

Thanks Gerry,
adam

steve-hosting36

We run dedicated boxes with Celerons and the 815 chipset (intel chassis and boards). The 512Mb is a limiting factor, but they can handle anything and are extremely reliable and solid, highly recommended

We use www.encom.ie for the machines

Stephen

Edited to remove cheap plug..