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Intel Cuts Prices, Reveals Details of New Celeron
Chacham sent us some interesting Intel tidbits from Yahoo! News: First, they're cutting prices on P-II and P-IIIs between 26% and 41% (depending on model) tomorrow. Second, this October they plan to release a new line of 600 MHz+ Celerons using their recently-developed 0.18 micron manufacturing process, which isn't "new" news, but the referenced article goes into more detail than previous ones on the subject so it's worth a quick scan.
No, you didn't. You're too slow. I guess you could use one of 'em new Celerons...
I don't know about that. The BP6 wasn't a HUGE thing. I mean, its pretty popular, but look at the facts. It wont cut into their profits until most people start running NT/Linux/BeOS. Whats the point of a BP6 if you run Win9x? As far as windows 2000, the "desktop" edition or "millentium" wont support SMP, Windows 2000 Professional will however. And of course, Linux, and BeOS have pretty decent SMP support (for 2 cpu systems anyway).
Nevermind my previous comment...I feel like a fool!
Yah, the HTML guru that posted the story forgot the closing quote in his tag. Sigh. You'd think that running a multi-million-dollar business might prompt these guys to take 15 seconds to check their work after going live....
Lets not forget though, Intel is NOT in this for the consumer. They're undercutting the Athlon prices so that AMD is forced to either follow suit or lose sales because of Intel's cheaper flagship processor. And if AMD cuts prices then they lose profits, and as the underdog, this is not an option. Intel can afford to lose a little profit, AMD doesn't have that amount of flexibility. Lets all hope AMD isn't driven out of the market.. -Tarnar (not logged in)
Flip chip is just a process used to connect some parts of the CPU die to the package, not a new packaging. Theese parts will be standard Socket370 chips. Btw, AMD uses flip chip on its K6 (and probably K7) processors for quite a long time ...
...on the author's part. Athlon has seized the high ground away from Intel's best parts.... at least for the foreseeable future.
Intel should merge the Celeron and P-III into basically one product: Lose the external, half-clocked cache, and simply have 256k L2 cache on-die, running at full-clock. A quarter meg of L2 cache is plenty enough for a desktop workstation or gaming machine especially if it's full core clock speed. The uniprocessor version and SMP-enabled version can be called diferent names as they see fit to do in their marketing-hype ways. They can make various multiplier-locked versions as they feel like, but stay the hell away from FSB bus speed locking.
I'm trying to hold out until the price of the K6-3 450 plus a good motherboard is under $200. Maybe this will do it.
from Kryotech in a few weeks.
800 Mhz now. 1Gig later.
So much speed so little computing time.
I think the main reason people upgrade is for gaming sake. I would have to say 90% of computers are used for Gaming.
Anyone care to challenge that statement?
Kinda like what Toyota did by dropping the price of the Supra by $10,000 a couple years ago.
I wonder what the limit will be for the BX440 motherboards. I have a 350 mhz now and was planning on upgrading when I can get the fastest chip this board will take comes out. Be nice to add a fiber scsi drive while i'm at it.
Southwest isn't the dominant player in the air travel business. In fact, the air travel business doesn't have a dominant player. That's the difference between fare wars in the airline bussiness, and Intel's processor price cuts.
not where I work anyway (U.S. House of Representatives). I've had at least a P2 400 with 64 megs of RAM and a 17" monitor since I've been working there. Right now I've got a P2 450, 96MB 6gig and 21" monitor...not too shabby. That's where all those tax dollars go. ;)
You must be talking about not just a chip or you got majorly fleeced... the 466 Celery was going for $130 at 'puter shows and has never been above $200... the P3 is just getting below $200 (450mhz, going out of production soon because 133mhz mobos might overclock them to 600mhz. ;) so you COULDN'T have paid 2x for just a chip.
some places have pretty liberal return policies and "price insurance", ie, if the prices drops within 30 days you get the difference.
...the article didn't say anything about disabling SMP celerons, but we know they have threatened to do it.
with these new reduced profit margins, i'd be suprised if they would want to p/o people by doing that.
ie, making less per cpu on the high end might make selling two celerons/customer acceptable.
They get to sell twice the product per PC. And don't make the mistake saying that it will interfere with Xeon.
Here's the proper link methinks: Good link (That is if I can get the syntax right...)
Noted and fixed. Thanks.
Well, _I_ double checked that it all worked. :-)
:-)
He seems to have edited my story and missed a small point. The extra words "First,they're a href=" was from my story.
Not a complaint. Just clearing my side.
Have you read my journal today?
Absolutely! If Athelon had performed poorly in benchmarks, Intel would have never cut it's prices.
The next thing to look at is how 1GHz cooled Athelon systems (from Kryotech, with AMD's blessing IIRC) affect Intel's policy on overclocking.
Well some Taiwan company will soon bless us with a flip-chip to PPGA adaptor. You didn't need to be a prophet to know Intel was going to dump the PPGA format when Abit introduced the BP6. That motherboard must have cost Intel a lot of money. As for improved heat dissipation. Yeah, right, whatever. The only performance increase for Intel is the performance decrease of dual Celeron motherboards. At least until the BP7 comes out we'll have 133Mhz overclocks.
The article was saying that AMD will introduce a new low-end chip based on the Athlon core. This new chip will be cheaper than a regular Athlon, but crippled in some way (as Intel did by removing cache from the first Celerons).
Of course innovation and price slashes always make going after the latest technologies at the lowest possibly price a little challenging....but hey. I'll take a good deal any day!
..or so it says in the article. I thought Athlon was a direct competitor to the PIII, being up to 40% faster at floating-point and 8% faster at integer?
What are these people saying? I thought Athlon was soon going to be 750MHz and faster?
Good bye Celery.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
That's pretty amazing. Not just the fact that he manages to do it, but also that he has the confidence to even try it!
---
I have heard that sometimes, CPU makers get round the problem of low yields from cache by making two versions of a chip, one with cache and one without. The versions without cache are just those where the cache failed quality control, and has been disabled. If only part of the cache is flawed, you can disable just that part and produce a low-end version with smaller cache.
I heard that a particular 386 clone which came in two versions, with 4KB and 8KB cache, used this technique. The 4KB version was identical to the more expensive chip, but with half the cache disabled.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Oh come *on,* don't talk wet!
Intel specifically designed two separate lines with different characteristics to cover more of the market; it's been doing this even since the 386sx was devised.
The Celeron was intended to be the cheap entry-level job, as Cyrix and AMD were doing too well out of the entry-level sector. It worked. As fab techonlogy improves, there probably will be more integrated caches and fewer compromises like backside and half-clock L2, but Intel will just come up with something else to demarcate its product lines.
Get real. And be glad that there IS a sinple bodge to overcome one of the handicaps.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
No great or unexpected news there, then, and nothing on when to expect 100MHz FSB Celerons...
The only unexpected thing, in fact, was how amazingly badly-written that article was. Lousy punctuation, grammar, and a strong impression that the author didn't really understand what he was reporting on. Bit crap for a major news service, really.
Hell, it was almost down to Newsbytes' level.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
Will these new Celerons have the processor serial number burned-in?
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Right on schedule, an Intel price cut to coincide with the rollout of machines with AMD's latest processor. It's so routine by now that companies probably plan their Intel-based hardware budgets based on AMD chip rollout timetables.
Given what this sort of price cutting does to spur PC sales, it's probably in software companies' interest to throw money at AMD to prop them up for a few more years just to keep the pressure on Intel.
i managed to find this info about dual celerons. it mentions some crazy stuff about having to drill certain pins out and rewiring stuff on the chip. If you look near the bottom of the page, you'll find info about how to get dual celerons w/o drilling or crazy (fun?) chip-work. =)
If Intel is dropping the price of the PII 450 from $230 to $183, how come on pricewatch I can get them for $180 now? Are these guys loosing money on these sales?
I just bought a Dual Slot 1 motherboard and a single P3 500, I paid 397$ for my processor. Tomorrow the I lose 150 dollars because of the price drop, dammit. At least when I go to buy a second processor it will be alot cheaper.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The article is here: Intel Cuts Pentium Prices
I've been drooling over getting an Athlon system for months, and now I'm reading all sorts of articles mentioning that AMD might not be able to manufacture enough of these nuggets, or maybe there won't be enough motherboard support, etc.
*sigh*
Without whose competition these prices might not have been possible. Competition is good, no?
The article didn't mention if the new celeron has the ability to in a dual processor configuration.
Does anyone have infos about that ?
"along with support for a 100MHz system bus" Silly me, I thought the Celeron supported 100+Mhz bus for quite some time now. =)
AMD has two pricing segments, OEM's and retail customers. The differentiation between Athlon chips is their speed, their cache size, and cache speed. The cache runs at some division of core speed. Right now, they're releasing Athlons with 512K running at half core speed. The architecture was designed to allow for varying levels of performance with price savings for low performance units.
:). Benchmarks on the Athlon are consistently higher than anything Intel has produced as of yet.
.18u process will allow for lower power, higher clockable units.
The lower priced Athlons are not crippled, they're slow because they have smaller, slower cache, likely clocked to 1/3 core speed. The high end version, called the Athlon Ultra will have larger cache expected to run at 2/3 or even full speed, and shipment is expected with 1MB or more of cache.
And yes, Yahoo! is in denial that the Athlon is faster(THINK PR
One thing that Yahoo!News declined to mention is that Intel, with the new Coppermine core is not expected to be significantly more efficient per clock cycle than the current PIII cores. The
I must congratulate AMD on a job well done. I'm not an AMD evangelist, just a gamer who demands the highest level of performance.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Is broke..
And i wonder how low they'll go?
intel holds a de-facto standard for INTELS. from what I've read, I believe the EV-6 bus is supposed to scale better, and offer better performance for multi-processored machines.
Karnal
It's always darkest before
intel does it why can't you???
oh yeah it's not "stock" and you can blow up your chip just like if you mess up the rez setting with a modern moniter when you are setting up you can blow it up. =)
MarNuke
Where can i buy these old crappy used computers???
MarNuke
Whats the big deal? Intel, or all other chip makers for that matter, cut prices all the time! If this wasn't so we'd still be paying top price for an i8088.
People can say that this price drop was all because of the Athlon; maybe, but if their prices didn't drop continously then no-one would buy Intel's new chips.
Next time, how about an article that says the sun set in Minnesota?
with Athelon or whatever the new AMD's are called now coming out this was very expected
damn it! I just bought a 466 mhz celeron for like twice the price of a 600 mhz now! damn you intel!!
-Dyl6
Its a pity I dont like PC's
Definitley a good thing for Intel to cut their prices... they've been way to high (at least in my opinion) for way too long. I heard about this before, and thought it was only going to be a 10 - 15% cut, but upwards of 40%.. yeehaw!
Best thing i've heard all day..
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sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
Meanwhile, the build-it-yourself hobbyists will have the choice of a cheap 1cpu Athlon system, an almost as cheap SMP celeron system, or an expensive SMP Athlon system. For anyone running Win2K, BeOS, Linux, or whatever that is not Win98, it is a no-brainer to pay a couple of bucks extra and get an extra 60-80% performance benefit.
Think of SMP capable, super-overclockable, 100MHz celerons as Intel's stealth weapon against AMD in the hobbyist market.
This is the way competition is suppossed to work, and I sure hope it does because come next year when those .18 micron celerons start to show up, is when I plan on upgrading to a new system and I want it cheap and fast.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.