Slashdot Mirror
The Celeron Casts Aside Its Crutches
A number of people have written in regarding AnandTech's
new Celeron 800 review. Why does this one matter? This is the first Celereon to use a 100 Mhz FSB, rather then the 66 Mhz FSB [?] it has been hobbled with - the competition between the Duron and Celeron heats up.
Uh, Hemos, you need coffee. Like now.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
While getting the Intel Celeron to the 100 MHz FSB is a way-overdue step forward, it still can't compete against the AMD Duron.
The reason is simple: Duron's CPU core is WAY faster than the Celeron, thanks to the Duron's Athlon-derived FPU unit.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
But its slower than the 600 Mhz Celeron... right?? Maybe if we recompile all our programs......
Hemos, if you post something and have to ask if it matters,... then does it belong on a website which states "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters?"
100mhz FSB, great. Unfortunatly, the duron still runs at 100mhz double-data-rate, or basicly 200mhz. The only thing holding it back (from the "cheap computer" segment) was a good integrated chipset, and they are becomming available right now. Not to mention the insane prices: while the 800mhz part isn't listed on pricewatch yet, the 766mhz celeron is $155. Actually if you search for the 800mhz celeron specificly, you will get two listing: $202 or $204. While at the same time you can purchase a 900mhz Athlon Thunderbird for $137, or a 1ghz for $169.
Nice knowing you Intel.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Although we (as in all hardware geeks) know that the Duron is much faster, I'm sure that the Celeron 800 will still be sold very well. The same goes for the Pentium 4, even though it's clear that the Thunderbird is faster and cheaper on most points.
Why you ask? Simple. Ask 100 random people what the difference is between Intel and AMD and the majority won't even know what AMD is.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'm surprised this article wasn't labeled, "The Celeron Casts Aside its second set of crutches." The first set of crutches for the original Celeron was the lack of cache! Although, the lack of cache was more like a crippling shot to the groin with a nipple twist on the side.
Check out Althea for a stable IMAP email client for X. Now with SSL!
FYI, ZDNet has an article here.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
The competition heats up? Yeah right. On every single one of the (many) tests Anand ran, the Duron 800 beat the Celeron 800. Every single one. On most of them, the Duron _600_ beat it!! But that's OK, right, Celerons are cheap CPUs, not fast CPUs, I hear you say?
(shuffles over to www.pricewatch.com)
No price for a Celeron 800. But a 766 costs $155. And the Durons? $71 for an 800. $47 for a 600. What a miserable piece of shit this Celeron 800 is, 100MHz FSB or no.
I'm not really an expert at that, but since the Duron is an Athlon Thunderbird with "only" 64kB of L2 cache (but the full 128kB of the L1 cache), the closest would be Athlon/K7.
the first Celereon to use a 100 Mhz FSB
If anyone knew what they were doing, the Celeron 266 was the first Celeron to use 100 MHz FSB.
news anyone?
The C-300A was known to overclock extremely well to 450 MHz; I've been running mine that way pretty much 24x7 for over 18 months without a glitch. The overclock, of course, was to run the FSB at 100 MHz, since the chip is multiplier locked.
(a) does this mean that the new Celery will give 150% the performance of an old Celery at the same clock speed?
No. An application that was absolutely, totally bottlenecked by main memory access I guess would be 150% the speed, but that would never be the case, I doubt you could even write something like that as a theoretical experiment. Real-world improvement will therefore be anywhere between nothing and 50%. Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus), so that would translate to about 15% faster at the same clock speed.
(b) is this new Celery that is released at 100 mhz any faster then a Celery that has been OC'ed to a 100 mhz bus.
I think not, I don't believe there are any core changes or anything to this new Celeron, just the faster bus & clock speed.
The Celeron can't really have all that much life left; I'd imagine money poured into it, marketing and promotion wise, by Intel, is having ever-diminishing returns.
.. so many of them were rated (and subsequently 'locked') under their real performance abilities.
... that whole 'you dont have to make a good product if more than 50% of your consumer base is ignorant of your market to begin with' thing. At any rate, now we'll really see if it's the commercials, or the quality of the chip that sells. Go AMD! I'd take a Duron 8 days of the week.
Heck, the official clock speeds of Celeron's dont much matter anyhow
But yeah, I go with the general concensus that the whole Celeron line was to confuse consumers
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
However, what about the power consumption of these babies? If I'm not mistaken, the Celeron has had some success with laptop manufacturers due to its lower requirements (read: longer battery lifetime), right? Now, does anybody know how the Duron compares in this respect?
OK, I know it's lame to reply to my own post, but..
Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus)
I should point out that quickly scanning over Anand's figures, there were only three tests that back up this Intel claim. Quake 3 at 640x480 (104fps vs. 84fps), 3Mbit DVD playback (24% CPU vs. 34%) and 6Mbit DVD playback (29% CPU vs. 37%). For everything else (and he did like 26 tests), the improvement was less (often far less) than Intel claimed.
I know I look like an Intel basher, but really, this chip just sucks. Even if they halved the price it would still suck.
For all those that say that this is unimportant, that all the tests still show the duron beating the new celeron, you gotta realize that durons don't run on all those celeron systems that are out in our homes now. Point being that I would much prefer upgrading my celeron system to a 100Mhz bus celeron than buying a whole new mobo and chip. For those upgraders out there (and there are so many of them) a 800Mhz celeron is very nice news indeed.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article yet.
However as a general rule, Anand isn't biased towards Intel, or any other product. He tends to be impartial, fair, and even-handed. His problem is that he's never learned to read statistics. Consider a series of nine benchmarks comparing two items: If five benchmarks show a 1% performance increase of product 'a', and four show a 10% increase of product 'b', he's likely to conclude that product 'a' is better because it won more benchmarks.
He's a good kid, and his site is great, but he needs some more math background. Or maybe just a sense of perspective.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
AFAIK (I used to do 'Research and Development' for a large OEM, but this was a year or so ago now, so things may have changed back for the good. I doubt it tho..) The Celeron is fully capable of running SMP, however since ~500mhz (can't remember exactly when) Intel have stopped them from working together. There may be a hardware workaround (I believe there was some talk of doing things with slockets when slot-1 was still about), but that's the official position.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
From Anandtech's benchmarks the Celeron 800 now slightly outperforms the Duron 600. The Celeron 800 though costs ~$200 and with time will fall to $160. The idea is it makes sense for people with the right motherboards to upgrade to a Celeron 800 instead of getting a new system. I think it would be better to get a Duron 700+mobo for about ~$160 right now. The Duron 700+mobo will outperform the Celeron 800 and cost less. The new mobo will also allow for a later CPU upgrade to a 1.2GHz Athlon. The Duron 700 is also quite overclockable.
What about the fact that this is only a rather passe' 100MHz bus, instead of 133MHz. Others have mentioned the DDR/double-pumped bus issue, but at least that one's new and AMD, not Intel. By now, PC100 is downright OLD, and PC133 is the norm.
Intel is clearly protecting the PIII by not enabling Celeron with PC133.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Rather than saying "Intel is protecting the P3...", you could say that Intel is merely pursuing a valid market segmentation strategy. Rather like AMD is pursuing with the Duron.
Differently able processors at different price points.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
All this talk about AMDs offering being cheaper, but from the best I can tell the cheapest/only way to a multi-processor system is through Intel.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Oh... you mean now it's official?
---
...the apparent allusion to the fact that they both need damn big heatsinks =) Puns, Hemos? Tsk.
// zyqqh
Wow! Norton Anti-Virus built into the motherboards! The amazing things Intel is doing these days ;-)
-jon
Remember Amalek.
How is "slightly better than bad" a good option? If you have a Celeron 433 and you are only looking at intel products, then you are selling yourself short.
:) Sorry this is so long, but it bears repeating that this doesn't seem to be a good option unless you don't want to get the most out of your money.
For 202$ you can get a 700 Duron bundled with an ASUS KT133 motherboardw/fan(you can prolly shop around and get it for less). For 30$ more you can get the same with an 800.
How much is the the Celeron 800 going to retail for if it comes at ~170 in units of 1000? Does that mean it will retail for 170$- nearly twice the cost of an 800Duron? How much is it going to run you in 3 months? The price of the Duron bundle above has already dropped 20$ in the past two months.
If the 600 Duron is about equal to the 800 Celeron(it's a little weaker, actually), then the 700 Duron is definitely going to be better.
Even IF you already have the motherboard you do, if you are considering upgrading your chip, since you are willing to jump past all the other celerons to the 800, I don't see why you wouldn't consider swapping your mobo as well and jump ship to AMD. Then sell your CUSL2(and the chip you likely would have sold already), and guess what... you probably ended up spending about the same amount of dough in buying the 800 celeron(probably less if you don't mercy the board away)- only you have a better machine now.
Or better yet- set up a family member with your old gear and help defray your upgrade costs(like I did). It's sorta like selling it, but you know it's got a good home.
Once you get into the AMD family, speed comes cheap, and will only be getting cheaper.
Egads I sound like an AMD ho... Then again... maybe I'm just a Mac user who wants to get the most out of any 'winblows' junk that I pay for.
:P
D
It's still slower than a Duron, and more expensive to boot. On pricewatch a Celeron 766 ($155) is closest in price to a Thunderbird (not Duron) 950 ($160) It's time to switch to AMD. At least on the low-end to midrange. The only possible reason I can see for buying Intel at this point is if a P4 suits your needs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The BX chipset on the Abit BP6 will handle FSBs from 66 to 133 in (almost) 1 Mhz increments. The main problem is that the new 370 chips (originated from the pIII core) don't have the same pin layout.
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.