Battle at 500MHz: Athlon vs P3 vs Celeron

Of the three processors, the Athlon 500 gives us the most well rounded performance and the Celeron 500 gives us the most cost effective performance. So what processor is right for you? One consideration we did not take into account until now was the future upgrade paths you will be left with after pursuing any of these processors.

With the Pentium III being available only in a Slot-1 interface you'll have to do a bit of estimating to see how much longer the Slot-1 platform will be around. Chances are, after the end of this year, Slot-1 will quickly begin to die off.

The new Pentium III B (133MHz FSB) and Coppermine processors will be available first in the SC242 (Slot-1) interface, but there will be a sharp trend towards Socket-370 and the new Socket-418 towards the end of this year and on into 2000. This move away from Slot-1 with all of the Pentium III processors will probably closely mirror the move away from the Slot-1 platform for the Celeron CPUs that we experienced around the release of the 433/466MHz Celeron parts.

Intel's reasoning behind the move away from Slot-1 is simple: a socketed CPU is much cheaper to manufacture than a CPU stuck on a PCB like the current Slot-1 Pentium III processors are. Case in point would be the price advantage the Socket-370 Celeron processors hold over the rest of the Intel CPUs available on the market today. Don't expect the Slot-1 market to have a bright future after the end of this year.

With Intel phasing out Slot-1, what about the Celeron's Socket-370 interface? The exact details of this implementation are still quite a bit sketchy but you can expect to see the Socket-370 interface to stick around much longer than Slot-1. The current expectation is to see a new generation of Socket-370 motherboards hit the market for the next generation of Socket-370 CPUs, but backwards compatibility with existing CPUs and vice versa has yet to be determined. The current Celeron core will probably last throughout the end of this year and into early next year when it is killed off by the release of the next-generation Celeron CPU, the Coppermine 128. Coppermine 128 will be the first 0.18 micron processors made for the low-end systems by Intel and will feature the same 128KB of integrated L2 cache that the current Celerons do plus the SSE support currently only offered by the Pentium III.

Since it was just recently introduced, the Athlon has bright future ahead of it especially if you purchase the Athlon 500 now. There are already three faster processors that pave the way for your upgrade path with the Slot-A (Athlon) platform, the 550, 600, and 650MHz Athlon parts. You can expect to see both 700MHz and 750MHz Athlon parts before the end of 1999 and this isn't taking into account the potential for overclocking those faster parts.

Just like Intel's Slot-1 platform, Slot-A has got to go. Intel has already proved that a integrated L2 cache is a viable alternative to the external L2 cache of the Pentium III/Athlon processors. They have also proved that it is cheaper to manufacture a single chip versus a chip soldered onto a PCB (as if we didn't realize that the first time we saw a Slot-1 processor), so it would make perfect sense for AMD to follow in Intel's footsteps.

Will we see a "Socket-A" from AMD? Probably not in the near future but it is a possibility to keep in mind. With the move to a 0.18 micron process it would make a lot of sense for AMD to drop the clunky Slot-A in favor of a more cost effective single chip solution just like Intel is doing with Slot-1. Will they? For once, let's hope that AMD does follow Intel's lead.