A simple Q:Celerons...

Bri

Ok simple simple question. Can I have a desc. of what makes a celeron worse than a normal processor and also, any comments on snags, etc. i.e. I've never bought a celeron based computer before and I'm just wondering how/if I'll lose out - considering it costs so much less.

Cheers.

Gerry

Celerons are not a separate processor design, they are just a version of the main pentium 3 or 4 processor which has less cache and they can sell cheaper. Sometimes the core will be a version behind the current latest and greatest. For example when intel launched the p4 northwood ( 0.13 micron technology ) they still had massive amounts of p4 williamette ( 0.18 micron ) cores left, and plenty of factories which could still only make these older cores. So they launched a celeron based on this core, with half the cache of a p4 williamette ( which means 128k ) Very recently they have now launched a celeron based on the 0.13 micron northwood core.

Celeron models vary in performance in relation to the "pentium" branded chips on which they were based. This is due to intel putting less cache on the chip ( usually half ). This is mainly a cynical move to ensure that the chip will not perform as well as a "pentium". I suppose it also means that intel could test as a chip as a "pentium", if half the cache is bad, disable this half and sell it as a "celeron". Sometimes the l2 cache "latency" ( the time taken for the chip to read data from its l2 cache ) is increased as well, just to make sure it will be slower. There are NO other differences between celeron and pentium. The effect on performance varies between programs, but is normally in the order of 10 - 30%.

Heres a page with a nice overview of different celeron models:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q4/021016/celeron-02.html

Bri

Cheers!

I'm sure it'll do then - it's for a laptop for mainly running MS office, and d/l files...I'm sure I can live with it.

Btw, it's simply a celeron 1.5

Any comments?

Thanks again,
Bri.

Gerry

A celeron 1.5 is a williamette ( 0.18 micron ) chip, with 128k L2 cache ( compared to 512k on a p4 northwood ).
So its not the fastest chip by any means, but for general office use it will be more than enough.