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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Marlin1975 - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Don't forget they were comapring a AMD chip that sells for 20% or more less. And also the the Sempron is AMDs new low line.Lets see how Celeron handles the sempron :)
SDA - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
The hell? An XP 2200+ beating a 2500+ in compilation? I think you might need to rerun that one.. the 2500+ is clocked higher (only 33MHz higher, sure, but higher), it has more cache, and its FSB is faster. AFAIK, there is NO way in which it is worse than a 2200+, so it should not post worse numbers.Minot - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
When are these going to be available? I'm sure I'd still pick an Athlon XP over the Celeron D line, but for competetions sake, it will be good to see a worthy value competetor from Intel in the marketplace.PrinceGaz - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Yes, Northwood Celerons have only 128K L2 cache while these Prescott Celeron 'D's have 256K.You could compare a Celeron D at 20x100 with an original Willamette core P4 2GHz (as they also had 256K L2 and 400FSB) if you wanted to do the comparison between core architecture excluding L2 cache and FSB. The gap would probably be a lot narrower.
Zebo - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Typo above: I meant AMD still owns price and performance with a two year old part.:)Illissius - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
Second Yomicron. I was under the impression that Northwood Celeron's have only 128KB cache. (Makes sense, considering each has a fourth of its P4 counterpart.)Also, iirc there was something of a price parity between Celerons and equivalently rated AXP's, so while these are certainly improvements (and not small ones either), they still fall clearly behind in price/performance (the 2.8GHz usually lost to the 2600+ as well as a few lower models).
Zebo - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
AMD will still owns price to performance with thier 2 year old parts and even more so with Semiporn. But this is still wonderful news for 2004 beleaguered Intel. Let's see pricing..should be worth $60-$90 starting.Yomicron - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
I think there is a mistake about L2 cache sizes. It says that both the Prescott and Northwood based Celerons have the same amount of L2 cache. However, the Prescott version has 256KB while the desktop Celerons based on the Northwood core only have 128KB.blackarc - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
hmm... if only i could use them in a dual system :DBudman - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link
How much does it overclock to??