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Celeron 2 Overclocking 78

Posted by timothy from the never-too-early-to-experiment dept.
James Yu writes: "FiringSquad has a new overclocking report on the new Intel Celeron 2 processors. These new Celerons are based on the Pentium 3 Coppermine core, but only have half the L2 cache (128KB instead of 256KB). We were able to get one of our 566MHz chips all the way to 901MHz. Sounds like it could be the second coming of the 300A. "
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Celeron 2 Overclocking More

Celeron 2 Overclocking

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  • PIII overclocked to 1438Mhz? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These people claim [big.or.jp] claim to have overclocked a PIII 800Mhz, to 1438Mhz with use of Liquid N2. You may have some trouble reading the page, as it uses japanese fonts, but that is _damn_ fast if it's true (any commentary on possibility, anyone?).

  • Re:SMP (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well technically the only difference is a voltage regulation pin and doesnt look like abit can get around this with their older socket hardware.. Boards/Converters that are cross FCPGA/PPGA compatbile. Check powerleap.com for a FCPGA->PPGA converter. $25 a pop tho, if your gonna spend that much it might be worth a new motherboard..

    dropn of #celeron(EFnet)

  • LNUX overclocking considered dangerous (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Months of research indicates that overclocking a dubious stock with intense hype may result in a severe meltdown.

  • Contender for CeleronII, try CuMine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Think about it. If AMD is holding back the Spitfire as it will most likely blow away or match the Athalon-Classic. The Athalon-Classic(no on die cache) competes well with the CuMine. This would lead one to believe that the thunderbird would take the lead of the market(excluding Mustang and Whilemette). Followed by the Spitfire. Folowed by CuMine and Athalon-Classic(at speeds where the cache multiplier isn't too much of a hinderance). Leaving CeleronII at the bottom of the market if it were not overclocked. Ofcourse, this is considering all clock speeds being equal. It would seem that intel is too busy concentrating on Itanium to pay much attention to the desktop market until now. We can only wait and see what Whilemette and sledgehammer will bring to the table.

  • Re:Spitfire (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, Dell made money by courting AMD and renegotiating a lower per unit price from Intel. At least that's what the floor manager told me.

    -A Coward from Dell Tech Support

  • Re:SMP (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Abit's BP6 is the only cheap (non-Slot 1) motherboard I know of. I just got one and a pair of Celeron 433 yesterday, and getting the box up and running Gentus (Red Hat for Abit's UDMA controllers) was dirt simple.

    Socket 7 doesn't provide signals for CPUs to invalidate each others' cache lines, and for two threads to disagree about the state of main memory would cause Bad Things. You could only make it work by disabling all onboard caches, after which I doubt you'd come out ahead. I think Socket 8 (for Pentium Pros) was used in SMP systems, but a single Athlon or P3 probably has much better bang/buck nowadays.

    I'm really looking forward to SMP Athlon; they use Alpha's bus protocol, and each CPU gets a dedicated 200MHz pipe to the memory controller!

  • sigh (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, 2000 @05:45PM (#1140845)
    i would rather have a half-as-fast cpu with twice the L2... clockspeed isn't everything, esp for DSP algorithms..!
  • History repeats itself . . .

    On some (but I don't think all) of the PDP-10 processors, the registers were also the first few words of memory. To get a speed boost, some programs would put critical code into these addresses.

    TECO was one of these progrmas. Your familiar EMACS began life as extensions to TECO

    Come to think of it, todays microcomputer caches will hold a large chunk of a PDP-10's main memory as welll . . It seems to me that in '84 or so my university upgraded to 512k, though I don't remember whether that was in 8 bit bytes or 36 bit words . . .
  • It wasn't so much IBM's design, but that the bios and msdos calls for IO were just plain too slow, which forced direct access to hardware.

    Programs that didn't directly access the video hardware did not have a 640k limit. However, given that the available display adaptors had hard-wired addresses, once the industry started using direct acces, it was not possible to move the addresses of the video cards, which both the IBM design and msdos would have allowed.
  • The interresting question for me is, can I upgrade my Dual PPGA 300A (overclocked to 450) to a dual 533 (overclocked to 850)?

    If that is the case, then I will be able to upgrade when they get cheap enough (ie. the lowest priced Intel CPUs).

    Any idea if that is feasible?
    Apparently Intel wanted to make it impossible to build SMP systems using Celeron 2, but then, they also said this for the original Celeron...

  • Buss spead is it. (Score:3)

    by Forge ( 2456 ) <kevinforge&gmail,com> on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:21PM (#1140849) Homepage Journal
    Nice article and all. I especially like the mater of fact approach. However did these goys notice the pattern in the benchmarks ? Those that are heavily dependent on the video card show the P3 killing the Celeron.

    Not because it's a faster chip or anything. It just runs the bus at 100MHz to 133MHz. When they push the Celeron to the edge it has a bus speed of 106MHz. Video intensive benchmarks will be affected by what the external bus speed is at more than any other benchmark.

    What I want to see is something pearly CPU intensive like a compilation benchmark. I build kdelibs in just under 2 hours on my P200 with 64 Megs. How long will it take on a Celeron@901MHz with 128 megs of RAM ?

  • Not a 300A (Score:4)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:20PM (#1140850) Homepage
    This is definitely not the second coming of the 300A; I'm suprised to poster, who wrote the article, would say this. What made the 300A (and the 366, to some extent) beautiful was that it matched, sometimes even outperformed a P2 at equal clockrate. For about a quarter the price. It even matched P3s on non-SSE apps.

    They managed to pull some incredible clockrates out of the FCPGA Celeries, but in no way are they comparable to an equal Pentium 3:

    While the original Celeron 300A@450MHz offered the same performance as a similarly clocked Pentium II, we can see from the benchmarks that the new Celeron will be significantly slower than a Coppermine P3 of the same speed. At 901MHz, the Celeron only outperforms the P3 by a minimal amount.

    It's still a pretty good deal; spend about $180 for a Celeron 566 vs. $230 for a P3-600 133mhz FSB. Just keep in mind that a P3-900, when it comes out, will mop the floor with your Celeron ;)

    --
  • The 8086 (and the 8 bit in/out version, the 8088) could address 1 MB of RAM. It was IBM's design choices, not Intel's, that created the 640K barrier. Of course, Microsoft's crystal ball was too cloudy to let them see what a liability it would be in the long run, either.

  • In this [gamepc.com] gamepc.com review, they seem to think that "Intel has finally caught on and fully disabled SMP with this particular Celeron family", but I can't work out whether they're just being stupid (i.e., putting FC-PGA Celerons in a PPGA board and expecting them to 'just work'). Do you happen to have definitive information that the new Celerons can be run dual?

    thanks,
    Hamish

  • Well actually what I have is 2 IBM Netfinity 3500-M10 servers with a quarter gig ram and 3x9gig SCSI3 drives off a 2940U2W adapter, each. They don't officially support OC but can be made to work with some careful adjustments. My point is that upgrading now involves 2xcost of whatever Pent. you want to put in here vs. 1xcost of whatever you put in here. That's the hurdle rate eg. the least granular cost is 2x. You will always have to purchase two of something to continue to upgrade. Yes yes we all agree that 2x something is faster than 1x something but the cost committment is twice as large vs. using a single CPU machine, putting in a fast processor, overclocking it to say 70-75% of the raw combined speed of an SMP machine, running it until you want to either replace THAT with another CPU and/or something breaks/fries. With the money you save you could buy some solid state disk and blow the wheels off most anything.
  • SMP rarely if ever makes sense for most uses if you're using your own money. I have a couple of state-of-the-art P2-233 2way machines circa late 1998 that are now way too expensive to upgrade. At the time if you needed to be @ the edge of performance this is how you did it. But, and this is the problem, if I had waited maybe 2 months I wouldn't have had to get an SMP at all. You don't get any price/peformance improvement trying to upgrade an SMP box; either you have to get 2 less-than-the-latest CPUs for a dollar premium or you have to toss the MB and start over. Overall your best bet is to get the cheapest CPU, while spending some amount of money to overclock it a certain amount, certainly less than the absolutely achievable max speed since cooling and retro-engineering will cost too much. Then run that CPU as fast as possible until it fries and replace it with the cheapest CPU you can REASONABLY overclock at that point. Heck if you melt the MB or anything else just get another one since you don't have to pay the premium for SMP MBs or worry about drivers and whatnot. In real world tests of interactive performance people generally can't tell the difference between +- 15% and generally don't experience any benefit until +20% performance. So in the end the best bet is to effectively upgrade CPU performance to only 80% of the max achievable.
  • You've never seen OOG?!? He's one of the coolest posters on slash! Though he USES ALL CAPS, he's still one of the most insightful posters I've seen. Though the above posts (and this one) may be completely offtopic, please don't judge OOG badly. The caveman's my hero!
  • The bigger the on-die cache the more transistors on a chip. The more transistors on a chip the bigger the die size. The bigger the die size the lower the chip yield. The lower the yield the higher the price. The higher the price, the smaller the market.

  • Re:PIII overclocked to 1438Mhz? (Score:3)

    by BJH ( 11355 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:56PM (#1140857)

    Yeah, they're using the Super Pi calculation program as a benchmark. Starting at the top ranker, their cooling methods and CPU speeds are:

    1) Liquid nitrogen (1438MHz on a PIII/800)
    2) Liquid nitrogen (1360MHz on a PIII/800)
    3) Liquid nitrogen (1283MHz on a PIII/800)
    4) Water-cooled peltier (1210MHz on a PIII/866)
    5) Water-cooled peltier (1270MHz on a PIII/850)

    Check out this screenshot [big.or.jp] of the leader's CPU stats.

  • Re:Why Less L2 Cache? (Score:3)

    by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @11:34PM (#1140858) Homepage
    Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!.

    Correct , but this is not enough to explain the performance difference. There is something else as well:

    • On the New Celery itself: There is some other crippling factor different from cache. Just cutting the cache down twice does not explain the slowdown compared to Coppermine.
    • On the posted benchmarks: If these folks have got the data right, most likely the celeries they have used have entered thermal dose mode. One of the most important reasons for the Celeron overclocking success is the fact that the thermal control on them actually works so they start throttling when overheated. And looking at the bench data that is what happened. Actual data for bench speed vs clock speed will most likely prove this.

  • Here is hoping for a Abit BP6-2 (Score:4)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:50PM (#1140859) Homepage
    I have been wondering when Abit was going to follow up with a sucessor to the wonderful BP6.

    I read the inkiling of an article over at BP6.com [bp6.com] that you could run the PIII FC-PGA in a BP6 with an adapter. I suspect that the same should be capable with the new celerons, still a newer board would be even nicer.

    However, the most interesting thing I heard was this from ars [arstechnica.com] :

    But there's more than higher clock speeds to these puppies. For one thing, they include the SSE instructions which, while they may or may not help you personally, definitely can't hurt to have. More importantly, they will be fabbed at 0.18 micron and include 256k of L2 cache. Now before anybody gets too excited, they plan to cripple them down to the standard 128k cache size. But if the BP6 showed us anything, it's that disabling can beundone... could be some exciting times ahead for overclockers...


    Mmmmm. Imagine O/Cing one of these and enabling the crippled cache! Wooo!!!

    I wonder if there is a serial number on these chips... Hmmm.

    And finally, I know that someone is going to start posting how overclocking can destroy your chip YADDDA YADDDA YADDDA. Well I have heard it before and this Celery 300A @450 in my machine has not exploded yet. If you don't like overclocking, don't do it. Just don't tell others not to because you are not comfortable with it.

  • SMP (Score:1)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 )
    I'd love to play around with some cheap SMP.

    Is there anything besides the B6-P which is a cheap SMP board? Especially, is there any way to SMP slot7's?

    Also, has anybody seen a cheap 4 or 8 way mobo?

    thanks.

  • SMP (Score:2)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 )
    But is the SMP disabled?

    Can these run in an ABIT BP-6?
  • It amazes me that many Intel chips now come with upwards of 512k (or more) of cache memory, which is the total amount memory that the original 8086 PC could support. You could run an old Lotus 123 program completely in the processor cache of a modern chip (including data and a bunch of TSRs). This really puts the infamous B. Gates quote, about no one needing more than 640k, into perspective.
  • Nope, what you say isn't exactly correct. The benchmarks were limited to the graphics card capabilities.

    "Mr. CPU, I'd like you to meet Mr. Video Card. He'll be cramping your style today."

    In this case the video card is the bottle neck. In cases where it isn't so much a factor (low res) the celery did better then when it was a factor (high res).
  • They compare o/c celerys to Non-o/c p3s because when it comes to o/cing the issue is price. What gives you the most bang for the buck? If price wasn't an issue the p3 is almost always the obvious choice (except for 366 and 300a).
  • AMD spitfire chip is not out, cannot be purchased and is 100% speculation. Making it 0% worthwhile to speculate about. Bullshit.

    It is -absolutely- worthwhile to speculate about this, because it's goign to be reality in less than 6 weeks, possibly no more than 3-4 weeks. It means something because -stock analysts- are actually paying attention to this sort of thing, as are folks who give a shit about their computing platforms.

    Second, AMD has already demo'd Tbird at 1.1Ghz. All indications show that TBird will likely be at 1.4-1.6Ghz at the time Willamette is released (if you want to talk about vaporware...). All indications also show Spitfire outperforming, or being on par with, the current Athlon. We'd have Spitfire -now- if this weren't the case (the original launch date was Mid-April, it's been moved into May).

    Speculation is what makes people rich, people with your attitude stay middle-class.
  • I never said it before and I won't repeat it, but SMP certainly DOES make sense depending on your application(s). If you `only' play games or MSOffice your way through the day, it will probably not help very much. If you (like me) use your box to compile largish projects on a regular basis, SMP will either give you a shorter build cycle (using the -jn (2 = n = younameit) flag for GNU make) or give you a responsive box while the compile is chugging along. Add in some extra memory and you're set. Of course, the viability of this hinges on the availability of a reasonably priced SMP board (enter the ABit BP-6), processors (add your favourite Celeron, possibly the new FC-PGA processors from Intel using a convertor or a motherboard modification - only for HW hackers though) and an OS which knows how to use the extra processor (Linux, various flavours of BSD, BeOS, WinNT/2000 (but the latter still suffers from various driver problems in SMP mode)).

    Oh, and if you're so inclined, you can also overclock this setup. I run it at default speed using lower CPU voltage, your choice...

    So, SMP is not (yet) for the masses, but it certainly is a viable and economically sound choice for some.
  • I'm sure you're correct, but I also believe this to be a marketing strategy. Remember the 486 line? The SX33 and the DX33 were the same chip with a little bit of doctoring done. The SX chips were simply DXs with the math coprocessor disabled. It was THERE, just (almost) impossible to use.

    Intel could sell the SX line cheaper than the DX line, for home/unpower users, and sell the DX chips to business/high output (for the time) users.

    One assembly line, two marketing campaigns.
  • I've never seen a post by OOG, and your comments are all i have to judge him/her on. So, I think OOG is a complete loser and a waste of time. Which makes your fanaticism quite funny.
  • Reading these, I think OOG would be disappointed with this troll poster I originally replied to.

  • Re:Why Less L2 Cache? (Score:3)

    by EverCode ( 60025 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:08PM (#1140870) Homepage
    Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.

    A small amount of fast L2 cache is faster than a large amount of slow L2 cache. However, you should start seeing L3 caches becoming common in upcoming Athlon systems... maybe 1 meg and higher!

    EC
    "...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of

  • Ever since I got my new PIII, my computer is doing the strangest thing, does anyone else's computer .... talk to them? Mine's got an Intel pottie mouth.

  • NOW... in come the overclockers, and WOW, can these babies overclock!!!

    Wow, did we read the same article? I was under the impression the article expressed a sense of disappointment that the celeron was so similiar to the coppermine. If anything the article convinced me that the celerons were "ho-hum" overclockers and weren't really worth the money, better to wait and see what is up AMD and Intel's sleeves.

  • Cheat off my paper... (Score:4)

    by ffatTony ( 63354 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:03PM (#1140873)

    Synopsis

    The celeron version of the coppermine has recently been released. These guys wanted to Over clock two of them to see how they'd perform when compared to their higher cache counter parts. 2 566 celerons OC'd to 901mhz and 850mhz performed marginally better than a coppermine 650. The celeron un-overclocked performed much worse than the coppermine.

    If any of this is wrong, its your fault... eyes on your own paper man.

  • Re:Why Less L2 Cache? (Score:5)

    by ToLu the Happy Furby ( 63586 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:52PM (#1140874)
    Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.

    Nearly right. The real reason that it's much cheaper for them to do it this way is because often times they'll make a PIII and there'll be a fab problem somewhere on the 256k L2 cache. Used to be, that PIII was either destined for a lower speed bin (maybe the flaw won't cause failure at lower speeds), or for the trash. Now, they can just turn that half of the L2 off and sell it as a Celeron 2!

    Thus, the cost savings isn't just from only having "one assembly line", but rather because they can salvage chips that would otherwise be tossed in the trash. Of course, they almost certainly have to purposely disable half the L2 of some perfectly good chips so that they have exactly as many Celeron 2's as marketing says they need on the market...but you get the idea.

  • Definintion Required: (Score:3)

    by iainh ( 67816 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:46PM (#1140875)
    If I take my four didgit serial numbered Commodore64 (S00006822) and
    mount it ontop of a circa 1870 grandfather clock.
    Then would I have the world's oldest overclocked machine.

    OR would I have to dip the C64 in liquid hydrogen first?

  • There is nothing like a "Free Lunch"

    Well its the truth, one of the main reason for killing the L2 Cache is that no one (thenormal users) cares about that number... the Processor speed on the other hand... now thats a seller!

    On a more serious note, the L2 cache makes it more exp. to make chips, if it is kept at larger sizes and hence you see Intel and AMD making handstands to get away with using smaller Cache and still keep pushing up the Mhz Limit...

  • gotta love Intel!! (Score:3)

    by ndfa ( 71139 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:05PM (#1140877)
    WOW.... you know that all the Intel engineers knew that this could be done... BUT they advertise that the P3 is faster cause it can do PC100 / PC133 or Rambus speeds (Hell i aint seen one yet!!! I will tell you when i do). NOW... in come the overclockers, and WOW, can these babies overclock!!! So everyone (hackers and gamers) will realize that these chips rock and they will become more famous than the alternatives.

    OK now here is what I love about Intel.. Gamers like em cause they overclock.. which is the coolest thing to do if you ask me.. freaking having more cooling in your system is like adding stuff to a cars engine to let it BREATH!!! And well the ppl. who dont overclock will love the price... Intel has this all figured out I tell you and this is going to be just like the 300A's!!

    Just for your INFO: They are keeping the clock at 66Mhz (default)... now as the article mentions this is usefull cause you can overclock by simply changing the FSB to 100!!!

    The 566 has a 8.5X multiplier and a 66MHz bus speed (8.5 x 66MHz = 566MHz). We used an Abit BE6-II for our overclocking tests, and after dabbing on a little thermal paste and slapping on a fat fan, we started overclocking our first processor. The FSB speeds flew by as we went higher and higher. The CPU was still stable when we hit the magic 100MHz FSB for a 850MHz clock speed.

  • I'd disagree there - read this [slashdot.org] post by OOG and then this [slashdot.org] one. The idea AFAIK is a sort of troll on form rather than content - posting clever stuff in a stupid way and seeing how it gets moderated. After all it should be what the poster says and not how they say it that counts.

  • Because, my dear friend, that would make it a Pentium III Xeon, and Intel wants to keep selling those too, with their exorbidantly high price tags. Admittedly, the fastest Xeon out thus far is 550mhz, and there are Xeons with 2mb of L2 cache, but I'm sure this is the reason. It would create a conflict in their product line.
  • It would be cool to get some sort of tool that could re-enable the cache on the chip.. by a Cel, get a P3.. -Foxxz
  • I had a mobo that took 2 486 66DX2 CPUs on it, when i installed mandrake 6.1 it said SMP motherboard detected, however, when i put mandrake 7.0 on it i didnt get that message but compled a SMP kernel anyway. unfortanatly, it wasnt finding both CPUs which is about what i expected.

    -Foxxz

  • It depends on the application... (Score:4)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:46PM (#1140882)
    Yes, for DSP or anything that requires lots of cacheing, a Celeron-2 would be less than ideal, esp. since its L2 cache latency is set to 2 (to further induce people to go for the more expensive and less latent P!!! CuMine). However, for number-crunching these are ideal cheap processors to put into render farms, Beowulf (I hate to say that word now, the trolls seem to want to screw Beowulf clusters more than they want to screw Natalie Portman) clusters, or anything where most or all of the important code can fit into the L1 and the rest can at least fit into the L2. If your app can fit in the L1, then there's no performance increase at all between the cheap Celery-2 and the unholy expensive CuMine P!!!. If your app can't fit in the L1 but can fit in the L2--most number-crunching stuff can--then the only difference between the processors will be the slightly delayed L2 latency which won't hurt performance on such an app by much.

    I ought to buy a cheap Celery-2 just to get my numbers on Distributed.net up to a respectable level. ;-) Nah, because the Spitfire Athlon that's coming up will be cheaper than a similarly-clocked Celeron-2, and probably outperform it by a respectable margin.

    But anyway, it all depends on what your applications for the processor are going to be, as to whether it'll really be worth the extra money. When a really good SMP Celeron-2 motherboard comes out, that and 2 cheap Celeron-2s will probably be cheaper and as effective in Linux or Win2k than a Coppermine P!!! at a speed grade or 2 above the 2 Celerons. In other words, the Celeron 2 still has its place even among the technocracy. ;-)
  • The SMP-ability of a Coppermine processor is determined by the stepping of the processor--i.e., the earliest CuMines couldn't SMP, at least not officially. I don't know whether the capability was still there, but just not certified yet, or not there at all. Anyone know?

    So, if the stepping of a CuMine--whether Celeron or full-cached--is 1, then it isn't certified for SMP. If the stepping of a full-cache Coppermine P!!! is at least 2, and prefereably 3, then it's fully SMP capable, definitely. While the Celerons are not certified for SMP work at all, and never were, they use the same core and therefore are SMP capable with the same caveats about the processor stepping. In fact, Celerons are probably just Coppermine P!!! with half the cache rendered unusable; this makes sense from an economic standpoint, because as AMD learned with their ghastly K6-III yields, much of the on-die cache can be ruined when the processor is being made; AMD had to disable all the on-die cache on such processors and sell them as cheap K6-2s, and when Intel gets a dud Coppermine it can still be sold as a Celeron as long as half of the on-die cache is still salvageable.

    So, to make a long story short, yeah, the new Celeron-2s can do SMP as long as they're not stepping 1, and preferably at least stepping 3. The trick is finding a motherboard that can handle 2 SMP Celery-deuces; I think MSI is coming out with one soon, based on a VIA chipset.

    Personally, I'm holding off my upgrade path (a lot--I'm still on a high K6-2 machine) until I can get an SMP Athlon Thunderbird setup, toward the end of the year. I do, however, plan to buy it one processor at a time--I ain't made of money. Personally, I'm happier with AMD chips just because I'm pissed that ChipZilla has been using the same processor core for so many year now it's pathetic. If not for AMD, we wouldn't have either Coppermine P!!! or Celery-2 processors yet--look at Intel's old roadmaps. It's obvious that they never have cared for advancing microprocessors for the desktop user. But, I digress... :-)
  • just to correct you, the so called "Athalons", don't currently run in a dual configuration, and we'll be lucky if we see a dual Athlon board by years end. (which was going to be my next system, but now it might be dual p3s)
  • My question exactly... Can you throw more than one of these in a machine? I know the official Intel answer, but can it be done? -gatki, proud owner of a dual celeron 466
  • I've noticed as of late Intel's processors have had less L2 cache, but running at twice the speed.

    Could anyone out there tell me why they just can't put more cache on and make it run at full clock speed? Is there a technical reason, or is Intel just being stingy?

    Why not Pentium III's with 512k L2 cache running at full clock speed?
  • You can get your hands on a Celeron II? Really?? That's strange, I don't see it for sale by any reputable retailers right now. Or did you mean that reviewers can get their hands on them and perform totally lame sets of benchmarks on the processors? The Spitfire's so close to being out that it's very well worth speculating about. In fact, there really isn't much to speculate about. We all know it's going to have on-die cache. That's really the only difference between it and the current Athlons. So what's there to speculate?

  • Yeah, but... (Score:5)

    by yarmond ( 114187 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @05:54PM (#1140888)
    Okay, you can overclock it, but what I want to know is, does it make the Internet faster, like the PIII? I'm not going to buy a new computer based on "benchmarks" unless they are backed up by a solid advertising campaign.
  • FriendTech Socket370 to FCPGA converter [friendtech.com]

    This card allows you to put Coppermine processors on normal Socket 370 boards, which normally don't support FCPGA processors. For more info on overclocking and these cards (in the future), I suggest HardOCP [hardocp.com] and Overclockers [overclockers.com].
  • Don't forget that the celeron IIs are FCPGA (the chip is flipped, so equivalent pins are in different locations on the array), not PPGA, so hopefully ABIT or someone will come out with a FCPGA to PPGA "slocket".

    Friendtech converter cards [friendtech.com], convert from FCPGA to PPGA, has yet to be shipped, but should be available within the week.
  • It's based on the Pentium III, you say?

    Just watch as your overclocked Celeron 2's melt as they try to uniquely identify themselves 901,000,000 times per second! ;-)

  • WHY only gaming benchmarks? Why don't these sites put kernel compiling benchmarks or MP3 encoding benchmarks or software mpeg-2 benchmarks or effective SpecINT's/SpecFP's. The less I play games, the less useful I find these kinds of benchmarks.

  • Here here! There really is a striking resemblance between this and the hot-rods of the 50s. I mean, you've got machinery that a high-schooler with a paper route or a part-time summer job can afford to tinker with. You've got noisy fans, companies competing to make the fastest chip, high-end chip hot-rodders using LN2. I love it!!! Better yet, there probably won't be any reason for the EPA to saddle these babies with anything like a polution control.

  • I concur. The current best bang for the buck option I have seen is plugging a P3/550E FCPGA 100FSB(~$180) into a motherboard that supports true 133FSB and FCPGA. You get a rock solid ~732MHz CPU and full functioning 256k L2 cache. Until someone figures out how to enable the full 256k on the Celeron-2, this seems to be a much better option.

  • C300A was a misstake that they won't repeat. (Score:3)

    by Worfalock ( 138276 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @09:31PM (#1140895)
    Do any of you really think that Intel is going to make the same misstake again? Never will there be a low-end processor outperforming a high-end one again. And besides, everyone keeps comparing overclocked celerons with un-overclocked P!!!'s ... Didn't you stop to think that the P!!!'s are highly clockkable aswell? (Not to even mention the Athlons that arn't even multiplier-locked) Alas, FSB speed has a dramatic impact on perfomance as a whole ... In my last upgrade i made a severe misstake and bought a C466 PPGA only to discover that due to the 66mhz FSB my old C300@450 was faster ... Luckily the local shop allowed me to change my mind and thus I now have a P3/450 rock solid at 560mhz with a 124mhz FSB ... It came out with three times more performance than then both of the old celerons ... and this with only 1/4-1/5 higher cpu clock ... No use having a hotly clocked cpu on a slow bus, it'll just be throwing idle cycles waiting for the rest of the machine ... AMD will be my next step, atleast they give you the freedom to push the product as far as you want to , not like intel who keeps trying to control us with their stinking multiplier locks ...
  • I wonder how this stacks up to AMD's value priced offering, the Spitifire?

    There are register rumors (thereby lending credence to the word "rumor") that the spitfires are actually faster than the Athlons. The register claims that they are holding back the spitfire until they can release their new athlon with on-die l2 cache. I don't know if that's true or not, but the Spitfire definitely looks like a serious contender for the Celeron II.
  • Actually, I believe these new Celerons can run on the BP6 using an FCPGA to PPGA riser card which should be available at the same time the Celeron II is released. Also, these chips may be able to run on a dual slot 1 board using a slotket from Iwill [iwillusa.com] or the Slotket III from Abit.
  • Another thing I'm wondering is whether or not these new Celerons will show up in laptops before AMD releases its mobile Athlon. Celerons and p2/3s are the most common laptop processors, but Intel better watch its back or else it will lose market share in the laptop value market the same way it's losing market share in the desktop arena. The mobile p3s are too expensive at least for my budget, so the new celerons would be a nice alternative.
  • Actually, I see more to this than the article mentions. I think Intel released the Celeron IIs to keep AMD on its toes until Intel can come out with its Willamette and the upcoming low-end Timna [eetimes.com] processor due at the end of the year.
  • Powerleap [powerleap.com] has an FCPGA to PPGA converter card that should work in the BP6. You can use either the P3 coppermine or the Celeron II.
  • The new coppermines have half the cache as the old katmai p3s, but the cache runs at full speed. Benchmarks show that this results in a 10% performance gain. The problem with having more cache is that the new full speed cache is on-die, integrated on to the chip. It would be very expensive to have more, and you would also have the problem of limited number of transistors before the processor becomes too large and performance decreases because electric signals would have to travel farther.
  • Hardocp [hardocp.com] has been talking about overclocking a couple of Celeron II 633s to 1 ghz stable with only an alpha cooler. They should have the benchmarks within the next few days, so we'll see how they perform.

  • Spitfire (Score:5)

    by maniack ( 146532 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:44PM (#1140903)
    Actually, the real question is how the Celeron II stacks up to AMD's upcoming Spitfire. The Spitfire has three times the effective bus speed of the Celeron with 100 MHz DDR bus (eff=200 MHz) along with the same 128 K L2 cache (on-die, full speed). AMD's processors also have the best floating point unit of any x86 processor. Clock for clock , the performance of the Spitfire is almost definitely going to exceed that of the Celeron II. The Spitfire has been performing so well in its sampling phase, according to this [theregister.co.uk] article, that the Spitfires "are actually, in many cases, outperforming their elder brothers, the existing Athlon range of microprocessors." Also, the Athlon is a 7th generation processor while the P3/celerons are 6th generation, back from the Pentium-Pro days. How long will this old architecture last them?

    This brings about another question: will Intel continue to dominate because of its name, or will AMD gain market share because of the probable superior performance of its Athlon series? I guess the answer depends on who gets more OEM support. AMD has won over several big name companies like IBM, but Intel's domination was shown when Dell decided to stick with Intel and froget about AMD despite Intel's production problems. It shows who has power when a company decides to lose money (Dell) rather than anger Intel.

  • Can someone tell me why it is useful to overclock a cpu or why it is useful to spend USD 1000 on the world's fastest Pentium? This is a genuine question, not intended as flamebait: it really puzzles me. Isn't it much more important to have your peripheral components, such as RAM and HD speed sorted out if you want to improve performance?

    Besides, I used to have an overclocked Celeron and it made the system incredibly unstable. Personally, I think increased stability improves performance much more than a few unstable extra MHz-es worth of processor speed.

  • I'm having trouble seeing how this qualifies as 'news', as these chipshave been announced, and tested, for weeks now. This is at _least_ the fourth such article on the web, and not exactly one of the most technically well done. Read here [hardocp.com] for a much better job imho.

    Even if we are to ignore the issue of this post being 'newsworthy', The reviews' implication that a P3 650 performs on par with the ~900Mhz Celermine is laughable. The reviewers decided (for whatever reason) to limit the 3d benchmarks with an old (many would say obsolete) video card. The bottleneck is clearly not the CPU at this point, an assertion backed by many of the other reviews of these chips. There is just no technical reason to support the odd results they got, nor were any attempts made to explain them.

    Come on people, let's at least try to analyze what we read on the web before we submit it to /. Geez, maybe I oughta start submitting the local bowling league results.....
  • There are register rumors (thereby lending credence to the word "rumor") that the spitfires are actually faster than the Athlons.

    Ok, first off, no offense to FreshView here, but I'd like to point something out.

    AMD HAS NOT BEGUN SELLING THEIR VAPORWARE SPITFIRE

    This thread is full of "wait and see what AMD will offer" or "AMD will trounce" or "AMD this, and AMD that" blah blah.

    I couldn't care less which chip is faster. The deal here is that you can actually get your hands on the Celeron II. It exists. It can be purchased. It has been reviewed and tested by the public.

    AMD spitfire chip is not out, cannot be purchased and is 100% speculation. Making it 0% worthwhile to speculate about.

  • Re:SMP (Score:4)

    by karlm ( 158591 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @06:14PM (#1140907) Homepage
    The BP6 is for PPGA socket 370 chips.

    Don't forget that the celeron IIs are FCPGA (the chip is flipped, so equivalent pins are in different locations on the array), not PPGA, so hopefully ABIT or someone will come out with a FCPGA to PPGA "slocket".

    I'd really like to see ABIT come out with a redesigned BP6 for FCPGA chips. I'd hate to have to get a higher priced dual slot-1 board in order to run SMP Celeron IIs with slockets.

    On the other hand, for those brave-but-stupid people out there, you can work on your technique for hammering those pins back out the other side of the package to convert an FCPGA to a PPGA chip 8-o.

    Karl

    I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

  • hmm.. maybe because firingsquad is a gaming web site run by Dennis Fong a.k.a. Thresh, who is regarded by all gamers as the greatest first person shooter player ever. personally, i don't expect macuser to post winbench scores either.
  • while the new celerons are nice chips, they definitely fall far behind the coppermines at comperable speeds, for a detailed celeron vs coppermine article check this one at hardocp [hardocp.com]
  • Well this puts BP6 owners in an interesting position. Windows 2000 just recently made SMP workable, but driver support is still somewhat iffy. I currently have a BP6 myself but I never bothered with SMP because the Nvidia drivers still seem a bit buggy in Win2000. And SMP is really only useful for compiling various things and games. But even Q3 performance only seems to jump 10-20% with SMP, plus take off 5% for immature Win 2000 video drivers. Now we have the Celeron 2. Hmmm. Well SMP seems to be broken even with one of those nifty Powerleap adapters. But how would a single C2-566 compare to a single C1-550? Or how does dual C1-550's compare to a single C2 running a 866-900mhz? Is it worth the upgrade? How consistently are these C2's going to overclock to a 100mhz (+/-) bus? A ~866 mhz Celeron 2 looks really temping to me right now. And it's not THAT expensive (looks like under $200) I wouldn't have to bother with Win2000's immature video drivers, a single processor helps ALL applications, and SSE can't hurt either.
  • As a marketing scientist, I wonder whether Intel is attempting to appeal to the "hacker" mentality by releasing these 'easy-to-overclock' chips. Surely it would make more sense from a market dominance position for them to exploit their lead in 0.18 micron technology to either 1) lower prices or 2) become the performance leader.

    The whole Celeron range of CPUs seems to be deliberately crippled, unless you think Intel actually wants you to overclock them.

    Intels website is at www.intel.com [intel.com] and more information on hardware can be found at tomshardware.com [tomshardware.com]

    thank you

    dmg

  • Too bad that using liquid N2 isn't something we all can do. At least not until someone comes up with a "do it yourself freeze-your-fingers-off" kit. Wich means that it is (for now) just one of those interesting facts that are cool to know about, but that doesn't have any practical use (yet, and probably not for years). Sure, we have a little robot running around on Mars, but has it changed your life yet?


    Chris...
    ---
  • What's unfortunate is people will still buy Celerons b/c it has Intel on the chip..
    It's kinda like the Tommy Hilfiger thing. :(
  • Vaporware? :)
    SO, where are all the 1GHz PIII's?
    Intel was in such a rush to annouce they would have then, and they still don't have any kind of yield. AMD had 1GHz Athlons out BEFORE the date they posted!

    The spitfire may not be out, but based on AMD's track record, I wouldn't be so doubtful that it's coming.
    Actually, right now AMD's Athlons are as fast as PIII's at the given clock, and they are not priced much highter than Celerons! Yeah, why wait for the Spitfire, when you can get an Athlon 700Mhz chip NOW, for under $300!
  • It would take dual Celeron 1GHz's to out perform a single PIII/Athlon.
    Remember, Celeron 900Mhz = 650Mhz PIII Cu. (approx) Dual CPU != 2X performance. For single process apps, an PIII/Athlon 850 will destroy a Celeron o/c'ed @ 900Mhz. In a configuration where you could actually use the 2nd CPU, it may acutally tie.
    Based on my benchmark (3D Games) Athlon is the way to go for ppl who want performance, and a great price.
  • And with the rate at which CPUs are coming out and forcing older ones into obsolescence, the additional wear&tear on the CPU is insignificant. So, it'll only last 5 years if you overclock it? How many overclocker's would be caught dead running anything 5 years old? then there's my PPro180, that I'm too cheap to replace, running at 210.

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