Background to the Intel Celeron       When Intel released the Pentium II processor onto the market a few years back, they stood way ahead of all the competition and easily had the best and most wanted chip around.       The Pentium II was the first chip to use Intel's patented Slot 1 connector, but because of this patent, companies such as AMD and Cyrix had to stick with the older socket-7 connection used by former Intel chips. This socket was starting to grow old and so AMD and Cyrix had to take a back seat to the mighty Intel.       Unfortunately for Intel, many users found the top of the range slot 1 chips too expensive and so had no choice but to opt for a socket 7 based PC. When Intel realised it was starting to lose customers in this area, it needed a new affordable chip, to recapture its lost customers. Enter the Intel Celeron.

Flavours of the Celery:      Take 1 - Mendecino       At its heart, the Celeron is the same as the Pentium II using the same P6 core, with the big difference being that the first Celeron's to hit the market, in 266Mhz and 300Mhz flavours did not have any Level 2 cache compared with the 512k of the Pentium II running at half-processor speed. This very expensive and fast form of memory not only made these Celeron's cheap, but awful performers when it came to normal windows operations, such as the use of spreadsheets and databases etc.       Due to its terrible performance, Intel had to drop the price of these chips dramatically and they never made any real headway in the market.                                        Take 2 - Covington       A few months later Intel had learned from their mistakes and tried again with the second breed of Celeron, the 300A and 333. These chips were exactly the same as before, but this time round they incorporated 128k of second level cache running at full processor speed.       These chips were also very cheap due to the fact that they use the same technology as the PII and so there were hardly any of the normal ski-high design costs. The Celeron's were seen in benchmarks to be very near to there PII cousins and Intel almost shot themselves in the foot making the new Celeron's far too good for their price point.

Socket 370       Now that the Celeron was becoming established in the market, Intel looked at the situation and re-thought its strategy. As I said eariler the Celerons used Intels Slot 1 design, because it was conveiniant for Intel. But Intel wanted to make the price of these processors cheaper still, to try and shoot the competition out of the water. They decided to make yet another new motherboard connection design, Socket 370.       Socket 370 saw Intel move from there new SECC (Single Edge Cartridge Connector) design back to a pin based connector, the PPGA (). By the nature of how these chips are produced the slot 1 design is more expensive to manufacture, and so by resorting back to a pin based connector Intel was able to cut production Costs.       This new form of connection now dominates the Celeron market and the slot 1 design for the celeron was discontinued. The celerons now come in speeds of 300, 333, 366, 400, 433 and 466. All made in PPGA form.