News
Intel Releases High- and Low-end Processors
- By Scott Bekker
- 08/25/1998
In conjunction with Intel Corp.’s announcement of 450-MHz Pentium II and low-end 333-MHz Celeron chips, nearly every major vendor released machines at both ends of the spectrum. Vendors already shipping include Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. (Round Rock, Texas,
www.dell.com), IBM Corp., Gateway (N. Sioux City, S.D.,
www.gateway.com), NEC Computer Systems (Boxborough, Mass.,
www.nec.com), Toshiba America Information Systems, and Hewlett-Packard Co.
In addition to 450-MHz, the new Pentium II is also offered at 400, 350, 333, 300, 266 and 233 MHz speeds. All of these systems are built around Intel’s P6 microarchitecture, are supported by the Intel 440BX AGPset, and run on the 100-MHz system bus, allowing faster communication between the processor and other parts of the computer system.
The Intel Celeron processors are now offered at 333 MHz and 300 MHz speeds. Both versions offer 128 KB of integrated L2 cache, right on the processor core, a feature left off previous Celeron versions that industry analysts agree contributed to the chips' lack of success. However, a 300 MHz and 266 MHz version of the Celeron are available without the integrated L2 cache.
Designed to meet the specific needs of Basic PC users, the Intel Celeron will be implemented into sub $1,000 desktops. Meanwhile, the latest Pentium II processors will be reserved for high-end, application-intensive processing.
--Thomas Sullivan, Staff Reporter/Reviews Editor
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.