Why not buy a Celeron? Computer Hardware System 3a
So many times I have been asked this question throughout the years "Why not buy a Celeron?" and try to explain the answer in easy terms to someone.
First chip binning, reusing, and relabeling has been going on in the processor industry almost since the beginning.
Do you just throw away a working CPU that may not reach the intended speed or that part of the cache is not 100%? No way, that would waste money and end up costing the consumers more per chip.
You take a chip that was intended for a particular speed, and when you get enough of them that do not make that speed, you sell it a little cheaper and a model down.
When you have a chip that has part of the cache not full par, you disable part of it and now you have a whole different part to sell.
Same thing happens with old dies and fabs. If a new plant is up and running at a smaller size, you want to produce your newest and best chips on that to maximize profits. But the old plants need to run too. So you shift the older into a different chip.
The Celeron brand came about back in the Pentium II days. The CPU and Cache were in the same cartridge. When part of that cache failed or did not meet spec, it became a Celeron. As the Pentium II CPU progressed into the second generation and on up to Pentium III, the Celeron remained in fabrication on the original PII design.
The original Celeron was introduced in 1998 and has seen production up through 2010.
Not all Celerons are bad. There have been a few diamonds in the rough like the 300a.
The Celeron 300a was in part due to the Pentium II going from a 100Mhz bus to a 133Mhz bus. Something had to be done with all the PII 100mhz with bad cache. So the 300a was a PII with very small or no cache or a scaled back bus. The great thing was the new technology used allowed the cache to run at the same frequency as the bus. So you could up the 300a front side bus from 100 to 133 and now had a much cheaper and much faster chip. Crank the FSB up some more and many people had 300a CPUs running as fast if not faster than many of the Pentium II chips.
I happened to have a Celeron D 351 laying around. This is basically Prescott technology from the Pentium 4 HT days rehashed and sold in the Pentium D days
So the Pentium 4 Prescott was released around the beginning of 2004, and by the mid to end of 2004 we had Prescott Celeron chips. In early to mid 2005 the Smithfield Pentium D CPU was released which was a Dual Core chip. The Prescott continued on now as a Celeron D, only a single core CPU.
Using the same setup as in Hardware #3 the 945G components, I will show what the Celeron was like. The benefit of this Celeron is the 3.2Ghz CPU clock, but the bus is cut back to 533, way back like the Northwood P4.
So in the great car reference so many times used in the computer world, I ask a person "Would you buy a car that part of the engine or transmission did not meet spec and so part of it is shut off?"
The car will still get you from point A to point B, just not as fast or smooth as the same car with all the fully functioning parts.
Only a few people would every decide that they could wait for the few dollars saved even though I tried to show that time is money and spending the extra could save in the long run.
First chip binning, reusing, and relabeling has been going on in the processor industry almost since the beginning.
Do you just throw away a working CPU that may not reach the intended speed or that part of the cache is not 100%? No way, that would waste money and end up costing the consumers more per chip.
You take a chip that was intended for a particular speed, and when you get enough of them that do not make that speed, you sell it a little cheaper and a model down.
When you have a chip that has part of the cache not full par, you disable part of it and now you have a whole different part to sell.
Same thing happens with old dies and fabs. If a new plant is up and running at a smaller size, you want to produce your newest and best chips on that to maximize profits. But the old plants need to run too. So you shift the older into a different chip.
The Celeron brand came about back in the Pentium II days. The CPU and Cache were in the same cartridge. When part of that cache failed or did not meet spec, it became a Celeron. As the Pentium II CPU progressed into the second generation and on up to Pentium III, the Celeron remained in fabrication on the original PII design.
The original Celeron was introduced in 1998 and has seen production up through 2010.
Not all Celerons are bad. There have been a few diamonds in the rough like the 300a.
The Celeron 300a was in part due to the Pentium II going from a 100Mhz bus to a 133Mhz bus. Something had to be done with all the PII 100mhz with bad cache. So the 300a was a PII with very small or no cache or a scaled back bus. The great thing was the new technology used allowed the cache to run at the same frequency as the bus. So you could up the 300a front side bus from 100 to 133 and now had a much cheaper and much faster chip. Crank the FSB up some more and many people had 300a CPUs running as fast if not faster than many of the Pentium II chips.
I happened to have a Celeron D 351 laying around. This is basically Prescott technology from the Pentium 4 HT days rehashed and sold in the Pentium D days
So the Pentium 4 Prescott was released around the beginning of 2004, and by the mid to end of 2004 we had Prescott Celeron chips. In early to mid 2005 the Smithfield Pentium D CPU was released which was a Dual Core chip. The Prescott continued on now as a Celeron D, only a single core CPU.
Using the same setup as in Hardware #3 the 945G components, I will show what the Celeron was like. The benefit of this Celeron is the 3.2Ghz CPU clock, but the bus is cut back to 533, way back like the Northwood P4.
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