Intel Celeron 1.7GHz - Pentium 4 Powered

Final Words

Now that you've seen the performance of the Celeron in the various applications you'll quickly understand a major reason why it has been launched on a Willamette core (0.18-micron) with a 128KB L2 cache instead of as a Northwood (0.13-micron) with 256KB of L2 cache; the 1.7GHz Pentium 4s are still considered to be relatively new processors and with a 256KB L2 cache the Celeron would easily perform just as well as the Pentium 4s (since they would be the same chip but on a smaller process). In fact, as soon as the Celeron moves to a 0.13-micron Northwood derived core it will be time for all of the older Willamette Pentium 4s to finally say good-bye as they will be undercut by cheaper Celerons.

There are a few situations where the Celeron would clearly benefit from a 256KB L2 cache; the two areas that immediately come to mind are general usage/office productivity and 3D games, both of which are in desperate need of more cache in order to gain better performance on the Celeron platform. With that said, the Celeron in its current shape does perform well as a general use desktop processor and brings an appropriate level of performance at a very cheap price.

For overclockers, the Celeron has a bit of untapped potential but that will truly be unleashed when the 0.13-micron Celerons finally ship. For now, you can expect to hit anywhere between 2 and 2.3GHz on these processors with a bit of voltage tweaking. Keep in mind that at 2.3GHz these Celerons will run extremely hot so you may need to revamp your cooling methods at such high speeds.

If it weren't for AMD then there would be no choices outside of the new Celeron but luckily we have the Athlon XP. AMD's Duron is pretty much useless right now, it has never been a significant revenue generator for AMD and its days are clearly numbered. Instead the Athlon XP 1600+ actually ends up filling in the gap quite nicely; where the Celeron does well, the Athlon XP 1600+ does equally as well, and where it does poorly, the XP 1600+ takes the gold.

The new Celeron ends up being a logical next-step for Intel and a good one at that. The processor needs a 256KB L2 cache and it will eventually get one but it won't be able to trample all over the Duron, instead it will be forced to compete with the lower end of AMD's Athlon XP line. A 256KB L2 Celeron up against older Athlon XPs while AMD's Hammer takes the high-end, this should sound a lot like the Pentium 4 vs. Athlon comparison that has been going on for quite a while. If you remember, before the Pentium 4 got a 512KB L2 cache it was losing out to the Athlon XP on a fairly consistent basis. A price and clock speed war will determine how the future of the Celeron and AMD's low-end Athlons turns out.