Intel Celeron Willamette: Hunting Down AMD's Duron?

Do you still remember the shootout between AMD's Duron and Intel's Celeron at 1.3 GHz? In virtually every benchmark, the Celeron was lagging behind considerably. Today, Intel wants to rectify this circumstance with their latest budget processor: The Celeron at 1.7 GHz.

As you may have noticed, Intel skipped some clock speeds - the fastest Celeron up till now was running at 1.3 GHz. The reason for the sudden surge in clock speed is that there's been a transition to the new core, which isn't actually that new anymore, and also to socket mPGA478. Intel's move simply consists of turning the "old" Pentium 4 based on the Willamette core (0.18 µm) into a "new" Celeron. The L2 cache, however, was trimmed by 50%, so that it is now only 128 kB.

And voilà - we get an attractive low-cost processor that runs at excellent clock speeds. And it also merges two market sectors so that only one platform is used, namely Socket 478. The result is that OEMs and system integrators get to choose from a vast variety of chipsets that support all kinds of memory.

Furthermore, Intel will release new chipsets next week - one of them comes with integrated graphics once, which can be teamed perfectly with the new Celeron. But now let's take a look at the newbie!