Celeron: A New Life

After an artificially crippled life at 66Mhz, the Celeron appears to be getting a new set of legs in late Q1'01. Intel will ship 66Mhz FSB Celerons up to 800MHz and will then transition to 100MHz for clock speeds over 800MHz. Overclockers of the world may experience a renewed ability to overclock the Celeron, despite its high multipliers, through the use of the more granular FSB speed supported by most current motherboard offerings. Most motherboards allow the FSB to be set to 100, 105, 110, 115, etc.

One caveat to Celeron's new FSB speed is that Intel is projecting Celeron availability to be constrained for the long term. Intel will discontinue its 0.25 micron parts while it continues to ramp up 0.18 micron chips to support higher clock speeds. However, Intel has tuned its production plan to maximize availability of the more profitable Pentium III processors. When pressed on possible allocation issues, Intel merely states that upside availability is limited.

The following table depicts the basic attributes of all of Intel's desktop processors, including Celeron.

CPU Type	P111(Cu-256)	P111(Cu-T)	Tualatin	P4	Northwood	Celeron-128
Process	0.18	0.18	0.13	0.18	0.13	0.18
MHz	>1 GHz	>1.13 GHz	>1.2 GHz	>>1.5 GHz	>>1.5 GHz	>800 MHz
FSB	100/133 MHz	100/133MHz	133MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz	66/100 MHz
Core Voltage	1.6-1.7V	1.75V	1.25-1.5V			1.6-1.7V
MCH (North Bridge)	815E, 820E	815, 815E, 820, Alamdor	Alamdor, Camino3	Tehama, TehamaE	Brookdale	815/815E, 810E/810E2
Cache Size	256K	256K	512K	256K	512K	128K
Introduction	Q3'00	Q4'00	Q2'01	Q4'00	Q3'01	Q1'01
Notes	Single Edge Clocking, AGTL+System bus 1.5Vtt	Coppermine Core AGTL System Bus 1.2Vtt - Transistion to Tualatin	will not boot in Coppermine system. Will use FC-FGA2 with built in heat spreader. Uses PGA 370 socket	1.3 GHz chip removed from roadmap. Will launch in October at 1.4 and probabaly 1.5GHz	Removed Tulloch from roadmap. Will support Tehama-E and Brookdale northbridges	Will intro in Q101 at 800/66, then transisition to 800/100

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