Intel Celeron D: New, Improved & Exceeds Expectations
by Derek Wilson on June 24, 2004 3:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
The numbers don't lie: Prescott is very well suited for Celeron. Not only do the new Celeron 3xx line of processors perform better than the previous Northwood based Celerons, but even when hampered by a 400MHz FSB, the Prescott Celerons consistently showed improved performance over their predecessors. Even more impressive is the fact that the Celeron 3xx line is able to keep pace with AMD's 2600+ and under Athlon XP line.The improvements in Prescott's core weren't enough to help it keep up with Northwood as a Pentium 4, even with a double-sized L2 cache. With a 128kb cache, much of Northwood's strong points were ripped away, causing plenty of costly pipeline stalls as we mentioned in last year's budget CPU roundup. With the Prescott based Celeron, Intel's architectural enhancements aimed at avoiding pipeline stalls really had a chance to shine. This is due in no small part to the increased returns on performance when smaller caches are doubled in size.
It's clear that at this L2 cache size, Prescott is able to avoid enough potential pipeline stalls that the increased impact of refilling a 31-stage pipeline is much less significant than Northwood's constant struggle to keep itself busy. It's hard to tell how much of this is due to the improved branch prediction and scheduling as opposed to the fact that the extra 8kb of L1 cache that the Prescott has is a more significant percentage of the overall cache size on Celerons than Pentiums, but either way, the performance advantage over Northwood is there.
The bottom line is that Intel's newest architecture scales down with cache size and bus speed in a much more graceful manner than Northwood.
The only issue left for Intel to deal with is pricing. With both the Athlon XP 2500+ and 2600+ easily available at under $80.00 (as per our RealTime Pricing Engine), Intel really shouldn't be charging much more for their essentially comparable Celeron D parts. The information we were able to track down tells us that the 325 will be priced at $79, the 330 at $89, and the 335 at $117. It's a welcome change to see Intel close the gap between price and performance, as it was distasteful for us to look around and see people being pulled in by ads pushing something like "only $200 more to upgrade form an Athlon XP 2500+ to a 2.7GHz Celeron!" Stuff like that almost makes my stomach cringe. Now that Intel's gotten a handle on performance, we're happy that they are tightening up their belts and starting to rely on quality (rather than the Intel name) to sell products in the value space.
A very special thanks to MonarchComputer.com for sponsoring this review.
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mino - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
#21 I didn't intend to make me looka 'smart', nor is my opinion I am :).But actually every second to third sentence in this article hurt me. To clarify, I just didn't and doesn't understand how someone who is making such review could make such a mistake, unless he is incompetent. And this fact is NOT good, it is BAD.
Cheers.
glennpratt - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
The fastest AMD proc is 2600+/2500+ Kinda lame VS 2.8 ghzDennis Travis - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
mino, You better read it again, Anand did NOT write the review.Saist - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Holy.... I just got finished reading the article, and I wonder how the Celeron D @2.6ghz would fare against a 2.6ghz P4, as I already know how an Athlon 2400+ fares against a 2.6ghz.Seriously... if these prices are right, I might not have such a big issue building Celeron boxes for people...
elec999 - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Almost forgot sorry, hows is the celeron D at intell 2.8gig compare to Intel Pentium 4 -520 and 2.8-GHz. Is the extra cost of the intel p4 at 2.8gig worth it.elec999 - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
I would love to see Celeron D perform against a overclocked amd xp2500+m or better. Also I would like to see how well the celeron D overclocks. Lastly I would like to see some seti per work unit benchmark results. Intel is really showing competition against AMD, it really sucks that AMD is unable to win in the heart of many computer users who are not hardware friendly.Marlin1975 - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Its still not thet GREAT of a improvemnet when you look at price compared to AthlonXPs for the SAME price, let alone the semprons.Could you please update it or do another look and see what the Temps are? Would be nice to see if heat is more from the L2 cache or just the design?
kmmatney - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
You can by the Athlon Mobile XP 2600+ for $95 at NewEgg, so it would be good to see a comparison between this and the celeron D, especially in regards to overclocking.nserra - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
%23 Sorry about the post, I was typing at the time so...It seams that the "future" celeron have 512kb cache when will be based on the 2MB P4. How soon is the P4 2MB cache is to come on the Intel roadmap?
nserra - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
What a bad review!Northwood Celeron has 128kb cache, not 256kb. How can it say the improvements came from L1 cache, FSB and core enhancements? Where are those improvements under prescott p4 vs northwood p4?
Willamette P4 is a better compare since it's also 256kb cache. (#10)
What about heat, and thermal dissipation, power requirements, ...
To notebook systems seam good, price is good.
For me with these performance improvements is a better buy then P4 systems for offices/corporations, since most of people have their computer to have a picture of their children on the desktop, and a stupid screen saver, and a type writer program, so that will do.
Really bad review must be offline as soon as possible, or as soon the mistakes are removed.....