The Story of the Celeron

The Celeron™ chip started as a low cost little brother of the Pentium™ 2 and was based on the same technology.

The difference was that the Celeron did not come with an L2 cache.  The L2 cache allows the CPU to store recently used data or instructions near by, to create a better conception of performance.  Due to it’s lack of L2 cache compared to other processors, Celeron really got a bad name.

In an attempt to respond to this reputation, Intel began shipping all subsequent Celeron processors with 128kb of L2 cache, which is about a quarter of the size of the Pentium L2 cache.

So what’s the difference?

The difference is that, the Celeron, while containing only a quarter of the Penitum’s L2 cache size, is built to run at the full speed of the CPU, while the Pentium is built to run at only half of the bus speed, partly because of cost.

So which is better?

Deciding which one is ultimately better is very subjective.  Many people will find that they get the same performance from a Celeron that they do with a Pentium.  It has also been stated that a Celeron at just 300MHz can manage an 8 page history of every person on the planet.

What it all comes down to though, is which is better for what you want to do.

In a production environment, that requires dynamic creation of pages, via scripting and database backends, the resource intensiveness of that type of site, may be better on a Pentium chip, as the larger L2 cache will assist in the loads.  However, if you’re primarily running static pages, then a Celeron will give you great performance, at a lower cost.

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