What’s the difference between a Pentium and a Celeron. Also do the rival companies such as AMD have comparable CPU’s to the ones made by intel.
Now is the time for all good men to come the the aid of their gazorninplatt.
i’m not sure techically what the difference is, but a friend of mine put it this way:
“A Pentium is a Ferrari going 450MHz. A Celeron is a Yugo going 450MHz.”
interesting comparison.
Phouchg
Pentium III chips have a different larger instruction set. Right now not too many programs use these but in the future it should come into wider use. Also the Celerons have a smaller L1 cache. Cache is the fastest memory in your computer and can significantly speed up some instructions. I would suggest looking at www.intel.com to find out more. Also www.hardwarecentral.com has info about lots of hardware issues. You could also email me if you’d like to know more.
More specifically, the Pentium IIs and IIIs carry an extra instruction set (called MMX) for processing large amounts of the same type of data more quickly - the obvious advantage being in multimedia applications, where processing an image or sound involves running the same function many times over. The caveat to that apparent benefit is that software has to be written to take advantage of that extra instruction set. When MMX was first introduced, most games did, but developers were turned off by the experience, and the second generation MMX that defines a Pentium III is seeing less developer support.
The Celerons lack the extra instruction set. This means that, unless you want a really great chip for games, movies and sound (and have the games, movies and sound that take advantage of it), the Celeron gives you the same power for less money.
The Athlon is a competing chip by AMD. While earlier versions struggled with quality control issues in manufacturing, AMD has apparently got a real winner with Athlon (the model designation is K7) - no manufacturing problems, and in every review I’ve seen, it beats the Pentium III for speed and power at a slightly lower price. It also supports MMX instructions.
Headless, I disagree about MMX seeing wider use in the future: I think it’s had its day, especially as CISC architectures (Pentium IIIs) give way to RISC architectures (Athlon).
Never attribute to an -ism anything more easily explained by common, human stupidity.
If your friend was talking in terms of price, then I guess that statement could be accurate if a bit misleading, but if he was talking in terms of performance, then he’s wrong. I have a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and in benchmarks my system outperforms both Pentium II’s and III’s at the same clock speed. This is due to the fact that the although the Celeron only has 128K of L2 cache, it is run at the full clock speed, where with a PII or PIII, from what I understand, only runs its L2 cache at half. I’ve seen a lot of users who upgrade their 300A@450’s to a PIII 450 and either see a small drop in performance or notice no difference at all. Basically, a Celeron is the guts of a PII or PIII (depending on the speed) with only 128K of L2 cache. In terms of price, it can’t be beat.
AMD’s new chip is the Athlon, which, from what I’ve heard, is cheaper and faster than a PIII at any given clock speed, but you’ll need a new kind of motherboard called slot A.
hansel,
Celerons do have MMX. They don’t have SSE, the new PIII instruction set.
In addition to the MMX instructions (which were introduced some time ago) the Pentium III has even more new instructions called the “Streaming SIMD Extenstions” (SSE). These are basically MMX-like instructions for floating-point data (MMX is integer only) and some extra instructions that improve accesses to memory. The SSE programming model is far superior to the MMX model. I don’t know how much application support there is for the SSE instructions, but they can conceiveably be used for some not-insignificant improvements in games and other 3D apps. As was said, though, the programmers have to use them to take advantage, and it isn’t clear how popular they are yet.
The caches are another area of difference between Celerons and Pentium III’s. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are now two kinds of Pentium III’s. As was pointed out, the original Celerons had a “small, fast” cache, while the original Pentium III’s had “big, slow” caches. Some applications will benefit from one kind, some applications will benefit from the other. It’s usually reported that they’re roughly similar in terms of performance. However, the newest Pentium III’s (which were code-named Coppermine) have the “small, even faster” cache. The cache on Coppermine runs at full speed (unlike the old, half-speed cache), but the datapath from the cache to the core of the chip is wider, so the data can get where it needs to go faster. The Coppermines also have some other improvements in terms of more internal buffers for certain things, which improve performance as well.
The last big difference between Celerons and Pentium III’s is the bus speed. Celerons are limited to a 66 MHz bus. The original Pentium III’s had a 100 MHz bus, and recently 133 MHz bus chips came out (note, some Coppermines have 100 MHz busses, some have 133 MHz busses, and some of the older Katmai chips have 100 MHz busses, and some have 133 MHz). The bus speed limits how fast the CPU can move data back and forth from main memory. On applications which require moving a lot of data around (such as some image processing, or displaying video), a faster bus speed can make a significant performance difference. On other applications (which don’t need to move a lot of data around), there might be no difference at all.
The major competitor to the Pentium III is the AMD Athlon. When looking for information about Athlon, you have to be careful to make sure you are getting objective information. Many people like Athlons simply because they hate Intel. Other people think Intel can do no wrong. Take everything you read with a grain of salt, and never trust a single benchmark.
hansel: “Headless, I disagree about MMX seeing wider use in the future: I think it’s had its day, especially as CISC architectures (Pentium IIIs) give way to RISC architectures (Athlon).”
Hansel, you are seriously misinformed. The Athlon is no more or less RISCy than the Pentium III. Both architectures decode the CISC x86 instructions into internal RISC-like operations inside the chip, and then take advantage of all of the architectural tricks that a RISC architecture is capable of. The Athlon is very similar to the Pentium III’s basic P6 architecture in many ways, it just has basically “more of everything” (which shouldn’t be surprising, since the Pentium III is a five year old architecture with a bunch of minor tweaks added on). In any event, even RISC architectures are adding SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Datapath) instructions to their instruction sets. SIMD just makes a lot of sense from the perspective of computer architecture. It’s probably never going to go away as a concept, even if a particular implementation (such as MMX) doesn’t catch on.
Uuuuuuuh… my head hurts…
Just get a Pentium, unless you are cheap, then get a Cele.
Was a real fun time when the Pentium wasn’t mathematically accurate. There were Lot of jokes about them.
Don’t let the Pentium hype mislead you. Celerons are just fine, and several dollars cheaper. My Celeron 433 can go toe-to-toe with any Pentium II in any application I am likely to use it for. As has been mentioned, Celeron and P2 use slightly different cache systems, and different programs are faster on one than the other. However, the amount of RAM you have is a far more significant factor in the speed of your computer, as is the presence of a decent 3D-video card.
Pentium III’s probably are alot faster than Celerons. For the price Intel gets for them, they damn-well better be faster! Still, IMHO the cost outweighs the benefits, as almost nothing can take full advantage of the P3’s power. When the Pentium IV comes out, a Pentium III will become a much better deal, and I might buy one.
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The AMD Athlon is the bomb right now. It competes toe-to-toe with the PIII Coppermines, and generally costs a lot less than the PIII, particularly if you are buying a whole system (the AMD requires a different type of motherboard, and some RAM is not compatible with those boards).
For example, right now at www.pricewatch.com the PIII 733 is running about $640 for just the CPU. The Athlon 750 CPU, which is equally fast if not faster, is running around $560. If you’re upgrading a system, that eighty bucks goes a very long way toward buying a new motherboard.
In the next three months, AMD will be releasing the Spitfire, which features 0.18 micron tech and an on-die full-speed L2 cache: just like the Intel Coppermine. Except that the Spitfire is intended to be AMD’s budget chip, like the Celeron is with Intel. If AMD remains tolerant of the overclocking community (an issue which is currently in doubt), there is a very good chance that dedicated overclockers will be able to put together a 1000+ MHz system for about the price of todays mid-range systems, and at the same time outperform the best Intel has to offer.
buy a G4.
heh heh.
-ellis
And that’s assuming you can get the chip, and also assumes you can get the motherboard that supports it (i820 chipset), and also assumes that you can get the special memory (RIMMs) that the board will take.
Seriously, Intel has had so many production problems with the Coppermine (PIII-733 and above), the i820 chipset, the RIMM architecture, and so on, that the parts are nigh-unto impossible to get, even if you have the money. (RIMMS, in particular, are hugely expensive.) Also, the i820 chipset, while it supports some neat features like 133MHz bus, is comparatively inefficent in design.
All of the above factors add up to this: the Athlon (K7) kicks the snot out of the PIII, especially at the high end of the range of clock speeds, and it’s cheaper, to boot. One thing you may wish to wait for is the new crop of Athlon motherboards to become available. They will be built upon VIA’s new chipset, which will support 133MHz bus, AGPx4, and a crop of other nice features.
NOTE:
All of the above is only really important if you want a top-shelf system, and are prepared to pay for it. These days, processor power so far outstrips actual demand that many users are better off buying two or so generations behind the cutting edge. The AMD K6-2 and -3 are also fine chips (as is any recent Celeron) for users who want to surf the net, play a game or two, write a few documents, do some light number-crunching and so on. My current system is based on the K6-3/400MHz, and even does pretty well on 3D-intensive games. Granted, it’s not the fastest or the best, but it cost me a pittance to build.
A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain.
Oops: the first paragraph in my last post was intended to be presented as a quote, and attributed to Sofa King. Sofa, my apologies.
K6-2 chips are very good chips even though the clockspeed isn’t as high as many other chips on the market. They were designed to be more “intelligent” instead of just throwing processor cycles at solving a problem. Plus they’re cheap which would make them perfect for a low-end system.
HeadlessCow, you’re right! The AMD K2 series is hot stuff! The meager differences between the the K2 and the K3 are hardly worth discussing, but the difference in PRICE is worth the best part of a mainboard!
But did Templeton ever get his original question answered? “What’s the difference between a Pentium and a Celeron?”
As I understand it, comparing a Celeron to a PIII is kinda silly. Intel created the Celeron to compete with the PII, period. So it’s fair to say that a Celeron can’t/won’t compete with AMD’s new K7 either. So?
The Celeron is/was the poor man’s PII. It has all the cool features; it has most of the speed; it has everything the PII had except L1 cache. One of the coolest features of the original PII was a hefty chunk of on-chip L1 cache SRAM. (Was it 256 or 512K, kids, help me out here!) The original Celeron had 0k L1 SRAM, that is, NONE.
More recent incarnations of the Celeron feature as much as 128k of L1 SRAM. These are your “better” chips.
It kinda reminds me of the move Intel made some years ago to make the 486 chips more affordable. Intel took totally functional 486DX chips, severed a selected connection or two to disable the math co-processor, and thereby created the 486SX chip. Without the mathco, the 486SX was not noticeably faster or better than a decent 386-based machine, but Intel was interested in selling chips, not performance.
Sometimes I could just scream.
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T
“As I understand it, comparing a Celeron to a PIII is kinda silly. Intel created the Celeron to compete with the PII, period.”
Since the Pentium III is not very different from the Pentium II, I fail to see what point you make (if any).
“The original Celeron had 0k L1 SRAM, that is, NONE.”
You mean L2, not L1. I doubt anybody would be able to find one of the original cache-less celerons (code named “Covington”) on the market, so it is probably a moot point anyway.
“about $640 for just the CPU. The Athlon 750 CPU, which is equally fast
if not faster, is running around $560”
In a couple months, be less than half that as all chips go that route.
For the average user/gamer, does it really matter that much? If you have decent secondary hardware (video card, hard drive, etc…), will you really “feel” that much of a difference in what you’re doing everyday.
Granted, if you’re doing high-end graphic apps or intense mathematical applications you may notice an appreciable difference. For my two cents worth, I think that most people won’t notice that great of a difference in performance outside of benchmark testing.
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There are no accidents 'round here.”
Celerons also enjoy wide use in the dual CPU market. Their inexpensiveness and rather good performance lend them well to this now that companies figured out how to get past the dual-processor block that Intel put on them.
The PII and original PIII were very similar other than the SSE instructions that Intel added. Newer PIII chips have large structural differences. If you want to see how much SSE changes performance check out Adobe Photoshop performance. Also SSE enabled programs are more likely to occur now because Intel released their C and Fortran compilers that automatically optimise code for SSE. These compilers require no special coding in the program itself so all that it will take to use SSE is being able to spend the $400 (I think) to buy te compiler and use it.
Celerons weren’t designed to compete with PIIIs but, once people realized how easy they were able to overclock them, Celerons started to enjoy wide use in the techno-geek market 