Intel discontinued the best value Celeron, the slot one model with 128k L2 cache. It was the hot ticket for fast/cheap because it was nearly equal in performance to a similar speed Pentium II even though there was less cache memory. The Celeron’s cache was on the main chip so it performed as well as the 512k ouboard cache of a PII.
Check out www.tomsharware.com for the SD on performance comparisons.
My Jesus fish can beat up your Darwin fish but forgives it instead.
Intel:
8086
286
386
486sx
486dx
Pentium
Pentium with MMX
Celron has MMX and runs a faster speed than previously mentioned chips.
Pentium II has MMX and additional instructions over the previous pentium chips. It also handles certain calulations better than the Celron.
Pentium III has what Pentium II has plus more graphics manipulating instructions.
AMD:
K6 is the same as Pentium
K6-2 has MMX and 3D-NOW instructions. Compare it to a Pentium II.
K6-3 has MMX and 3D-NOW and competes with the Pentium III.
Alathon best out there for now.
I forgot to mention the elusive K7 chip, or the Pentium Pro server chip.
Some minor, inconsequential additions to the above list:
-8088
-386sx
-386dx
You whippersnappers left out the 8080 and 80186.
Don’t forget. Never admit to presently owning a chip that rhymes with Pyrex. That’s like saying you own a Gremlin for a car.
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
I’m old enough to admit to writing programs in machine language. I started C++, but unless your going to do it for a living there’s to much happening out there to stay current.
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
“Pentium II has MMX and additional instructions over the previous pentium chips. It also handles certain calulations better than the Celeron.”
That’s not true at all. There was no difference in the core between the Pentium II and Celeron processors, the only difference was in the caches. They could perform “calculations” identically (indeed, as has been mentioned in this thread, some Celerons were very popular with overclockers because they could actually be made to run better and faster than Pentium II’s). However, there are more differences between Pentium III and Celerons now.
“K6-3 has MMX and 3D-NOW and competes with the Pentium III.”
That may be what AMD would like, but the marketplace more or less thinks that K6-3 competes with Celeron.
“I forgot to mention the elusive K7 chip”
It’s not elusive, it’s called Athlon.
I was thinking of an article that said AMD was dropping the K7 for the Alathon. It didn’t sink in that they were refering to the name only.
The PII does do calaculations for business applications better than the Celron. For gaming applications no real difference.
The k6-3 ranking. I would buy the PIII over the K6-3 anyday. I just gave out rough comparisons for the teaming m…s. I’m afraid to use that phrase any more.
Have you checked out the lastest Pentium 3 500E and 550E coppermine? http://www2.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/intel_flipchip/
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
“The PII does do calaculations for business applications better than the Celron. For gaming applications no real difference.”
I think this is simply an issue of semantics. The performance difference you see is the result of the different cache structures. When you said “calculations”, I thought you meant adds, subtracts, etc., which are identical on Penitum II and Celerons.
Okay, here’s the straight dope:
Straight from the Intel website
So, basically it’s a PII with less onboard cache, (128 MB vs. 512 MB) fewer transistors, (approx 6M vs. 7.5M) and more variants of arcitecture available. By the way, the numbers above are based on 300 MHz models.
And about the AMD Athlon? Get this: The Kadoka motherboard uses a 100MHz frontside bus-too bad the RAM isn’t that fast! And also, due to the faster bus you cannot use a network card of any kind! I’m not saying it isn’t a great CPU, cuz it is, it just isn’t the end all be all that seems to be touted to be.
You want a bad-ass CPU? AMD is really good. So is intel… Check out the Itanium specs at the preceding link.
My reccomendation, of course, is to buy a Mac or a Sun system. Mac just kicks the competition’s asses, and people who know what the hell they are doing use Macs.
All the cool stuff you see in the movies? Watch the credits and usually everything is done on Sun Microsystems.
Good thing no one knows where I work. Working for a major PC manufacturer, if they found out I was touting the competition, they would be pissed 
!
Fat Guy in a Little Coat,
SDMB Self-Righteous Clique
Ok… I just got a puter with a Celeron 466. It came with 64MBram and is heckuva lot faster than my 200mmx was with 64MBram. I just ordered another 128MB ram for it. What I think I’ll try before I install the new memodo is time certain operations that I do often, like 1) Booting up Win 98 2)Booting up Win 98 with my AV turned off 3) launching AOL and 4) launching power tools. Then I’ll time the same tasks after I put the memory in. Do you folks want to see my results?
Oh, by the way, what was the speed range of the intel P II ?
Ranger Jeff
*The Idol of American Youth *
Riders In The Sky
Oh, I don’t know what the hell ‘memodo’ is. I meant to type ‘memory’. I just washed my hands and can’t do a damned thing with them.
Ranger Jeff
*The Idol of American Youth *
Riders In The Sky
Which was already explained, except it’s smaller but faster (twice as fast, actually), which is an important distinction.
I don’t know about this motherboard specifically, but I think 100 MHz SDRAMs are quite common. Did you mean 200 MHz?
That has got to be false. Where did you get that bit of misinformation? That defies all logic and everything I know about computers and systems.
Do you think you’re talking about the real world or the Steve Jobs’ fantasy world?
Sun’s big business, to my knowledge, is servers. Their processors and systems are pretty far back in the pack in terms of performance (they make their money on top-to-bottom product offerings – software, OS, hardware, network…). I would be amazed if the majority of graphics workstations in use by the bigtime Hollywood players were Sun machines. Silicon Graphics I could believe… I also heard that Alpha processor (from Compaq, formerly from DEC) based workstations were popular for graphics work. I think you’re misinformed here, too.
Ranger Jeff: A lot of those operations, such as booting up, are likely to be limited by your I/O devices (disk drives, etc.), so you may not see a big difference in performance for those tasks. You may want to try to pick some different choices for your benchmarking if you want to convince yourself that you made a wise investment. Your multitasking performance should be better with more memory, for example.
Actually many researchers I know are switching from Sun workstations to Linux PCs. You can’t beat the cost performance, and since they are more standardized, they are easier and cheaper to maintain and upgrade. SGI used to be popular, but aren’t they making WinNT boxes with Intel CPUs these days? Or do they still make nice graphics workstations?
Let’s not even start a Mac vs. PC war…
Since there are a lot of H/w heads here, does anyone know what became of IBM’S copper-instead-of-silicon Gigahertz processor that was released (prototype) in '97?
Apparently they were going to kick serious ass with it when it hit the marketplace since all other manufacturers were way behind in research. This was big news a while back and since then there hasn’t been a peep.
Intel’s “copper” CPU is the second generation of PIII chips. They are the Coppermine series of chips. They use a 0.18 micron manufacturing process instead of the 0.25? micron process that is used in the other PIII chips. Intel is still planning to release chips in the future using actual copper interconnections but I’m not sure when that will actually be.
Also AMD’s Athlon chips use a 200mhz system bus for faster speed. I’m not sure exactly how their memory bus interfaces with it because other than RAMBUS and DDRSDRAM memory right now doesn’t go faster than 133mhz. The Athlons are perfectly capable of running network cards though.
Sun computers are most useful in a networked environment not on your desk at home. Macs in general suck (although I do like the G4 processor, bravo Motorolla). SGI’s are still top of the line for computer graphics applications. They use Intel server processors (Pentium Pro and Xeon series) but their main advantage is the SGI graphics subsystem.