Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Needless to say, this caused a lot of confusion in the marketplace about the Celeron. Con-
sideringthattheCeleronstartedoutasa“crippled”PentiumIIandthenwasrevisedtoac-
tually be superior in some ways to the Pentium II on which it was based (all while selling
for less), many didn't know just where the Celeron stood in terms of performance. For-
tunately,the crippling lack ofL2 cache existed only in the earliest Celeron versions; all of
those at speeds greater than 300MHz have on-die full-speed L2 cache.
Sincethen,theCeleronhasbeenreleasedinmanydifferentversions,witheachnewerone
based on the then-current mainstream processor. The latest Celerons use the same basic
45nm “Wolfdale” core as more expensive Core 2 processors. The difference is that the
Celeron versions are offered in lower processor and bus clock speeds and with smaller
caches, to justify a lower price point.
Because Intel has offered Celeron and Celeron D processors in many distinctive vari-
ations, it's easy to get confused as to which is which, or which is available at a specific
speed. By identifying the spec number of a particular chip and looking up the number on
the Intel product information website (
http://ark.intel.com/Default.aspx
), you can find out
the exact specification, including socket type, voltage, stepping, cache size, and other in-
formation. If you don't know the spec number, you can still look up the processor by the
model number, or you can use software such as CPU-Z (
www.cpuid.com
)
to find more
detailed information about the processor.
Intel Pentium 4 Processors
The Pentium 4 was introduced in November 2000 and represented a new generation in
processors (see
Figure 3.27
)
. If this one had a number instead of a name, it might be
calledthe786becauseitrepresentsagenerationbeyondtheprevious686classprocessors.
Several variations on the Pentium 4 have been released, based on the processor die and
architecture. Several of the processor dies are shown in
Figure 3.28
.
Figure 3.27
Pentium 4 FC-PGA2 processor.
