CELERON 1.7GHZ VERSES PENTIUM4 1.7GHZ 1

[Electrifier]

friends,

I want to buy a new PC. Will you please tell me that what are deficenices of CELERON verses INTEL P4 of same speed. My applications are simple as net surfing, MS OFFICE and CAD works.

 

[Lewish]

I think those are the same. Otherwise you get names like Duron, Athlon, Itanium, Xeon, etc., which defines the abilities of the chip. FSB speed, etc.

 

[IRstuff]

The Celeron and Pentium are not the same processor in performance. As with the older generation of 486 processors, the Celeron's objective market was a cost-sensitive market, therefore, performance was sacrificed to get more die per wafer to lower cost. This was primarily achieved by multiplexing data and addressing to reduce the physical area of those functions. TTFN

 

[Lewish]

Hi IRstuff. I am going to agree and disagree with what you said. First we have to clear up the confusion over the name Celeron. The problem with it is - Intel has used this name to identify more than one processor family. There is a P2, a P3 and a P4 version of the Celeron processors. So, I stand by my statement that the P4 and the Celeron are the same. See:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/processors/celeron/index.htm?iid=sr+celeron&

for more info.
But, I do agree with you that the Celeron is a cost reduced processor.

 

[IRstuff]

Lewish,

Agreed, the core processor in each generation of Celeron corresponds to the Pentium of that generation.

The Celeron still has essentially a hobbled I/O channel to get the cost down, so performance-wise, particularly for I/O intensive processing, the Pentium will out perform the Celeron. Conversely, if you looking strictly at a tight loop process with little or no I/O, there would be very little difference, although there still might be some differences in the cache implementation. TTFN

 

[melone]

Doesn't the Celeron have less instructions than the Pentium?

 

[IRstuff]

As far as I've been able to tell, the Celeron and Pentium use the same architecture reference manual, e.g., the IA-32 instruction set architecture.

Given that, however, the Celeron and P4 are quite different from a hardware perspective. Aside from the multiplexed busses, the Celeron has only a 128K on-die L2 cache, while the P4 has a 512K on-die L2. There may also be subtle differences in the implementation of the pipelining, although most of that is transparent to the average user.

This makes sense for the most part, since almost all Windows software will run on any processor, regardless of generation. TTFN

 

[melone]

I believe that all Microsoft applications are developed on the latest and greatest flavor of the Pentium family. Therefore, Microsoft applications are optimized for Pentiums, but will run on Celeron (but slower).

 

[IRstuff]

I think it's actually the other way around. Development is driven to the product that produces the largest net revenue stream. Windows costs the same whether it's installed on a Celeron or P4, but there should have been more Celerons sold than P4, hence optimization is for Celeron, not P4.

Additionally, it's unlikely that Microsoft has had to worry about throughput, since that's just a clarion call for a bigger processor with another copy of Windows installed. Compiler switches are notorious for not being set the way you intend; yet I've seen little evidence that there have been significant bugs caused by improper targeting of instruction sets between Celeron and Pentium.

Based on the the Intel documentation, they make zero distinction between Celeron and Pentium software architecture; there is only one IA-32 software and P-6 hardware architecture manual, and zero mention of Celeron as a special case.
TTFN

 

[melone]

Didn't the Pentium brand come out at least a couple of years before the Celeron? Wasn't the Celeron designed to help apease the higher end users that knew that they didn't require the processing power of the Pentium for dedicated applications, i.e. data entry / recording?

Also, I thought that the pleasant side effect was that Intel looks like they took the technophobics into consideration by developing a low cost, bare bones processor for the letter writer / email checker end users.

 

[IRstuff]

Yes and No.

The Pentium, like the 486, came out first, followed by the Celeron and the 486-S, respectively. Both were intended for the lower performance requirements, that were driven by cost sensitivity. The cost and reduced performance were achieved in one fell swoop by multiplexing the data and address busses so that external accesses took twice as long, but in only half the hardware. Likewise the reduction in L2 cache to reduce die size reduces the manufacturing cost.

BUT, the instruction set is the same, otherwise, Mathcad and other high performance applications would crash and burn on a Celeron, but they don't, at least, not for an instruction set difference.

Changing the instruction set actually increases manufacturing AND support costs, since you now need different test programs for each chip, different compilers, etc. Additionally, the microcode is actually one of the smallest areas of the chip and reducing the instruction set does not really save that much die area.

Even TTFN

 

[bobbyv]

Interesting debate. Although it is very easily solved. The celeron has notoriously been the "value pentium". It has always had a slower clock speed and less L2(internal cache). Will a person surfing the internet and running office programs notice a difference? Probably not. But if you want to compare numbers here are some benchmarks and comparisons:

http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020903/

If you have the choice go with an Athlon XP

Good Luck

 

[MicroEng]

hi all
i think celeron tell to the intel`s procecor with 128k
cash memory (or less).P4 1.7GH celeron mean CPU P4(400 bus)
with 1.7GH speed & 128k cash memory.the half CPU mean 256k
cash & the full CPU mean 512k cash memory.however if u need
the best system speed u must take CPU P4 with 512k cash(FULL CASH))& DDR RAM(266 BUS)or RD RAM(800 BUS).for example the MDT6 program is running and operating better with 512k cash of CPU.
best regard.

 

[Nehemiah]

Electrifier,

Based upon your description of the work the computer will be used for.....I would recommend the you simply get a Celeron processor with as much RAM as you can afford. Ya, your L2 cache is bigger in a P-4, and there is a slight speed difference running CAD. But, the driving factor on CAD is RAM. You will need as much RAM as possible. Therefore, from an economics point of view, it is more feasible to get as much RAM as possible, then buy the fastest Celeron you can afford with what is left (assuming greater than 2.0Ghz). By starting with the most RAM you achieving the best performance for you money. Then choose the processor. The internet and MS Office use does not factor into the equation at all.

The above arguements and opinions are valid, however, I have found that the money difference between P-4 and Celeron was not justified for CAD use and have since stuck with Celeron and large amounts of RAM.

 

[EngineerDave]

Where does the Athlon fall into place in all of this, assuming a similar processing speed as stated on the tag?

I have never fully resolved the processor issue in my mind either. Everything I've bought for home use has been Pentium, I have never had a Athlon or Celeron. But for business use recently, to save cost we went with a unit with an Athlon processor (don't have the specs of it in front of me right now though)

 

[IRstuff]

Sadly, the answer is "it depends." The architectures are somewhat dissimilar, so in certain cases, a P4 will be faster, it others the Athlon will be faster. This is further complicated by whether either system has comparable I/O and memory, as that will sometimes have a bigger effect that the processor speed itself.

If you go through the postings above, you'll see that while a Celeron and Pentium could have the same clock speed, they don't process data at the same performance, due to limitations of the I/O and cache memory.

TTFN

 

[ceh4702]

The Celeron has a smaller Cache size and a 400 Mhz Bus. The cache size is 128k compared to 512k on some P4. Cache size equals speed. This affects performance on CPU intensive tasks. Rendering images may be slower as far as CAD is concerned. Simple word processing and chat and E-mail will not suffer at all. Really only things like games and encoding audio and video will be noticeably smaller. I can run word 97 on my 1.2 Gig Celeron or my 800 Mhz Via MINI-ITX motherboard.