Celeron and Xeon: Intel Aims At The High/Low End
At the end of the 1990s, Intel launched two of its best-known processor brands: Celeron and Xeon. The former was aimed at the budget market and the latter at servers, and sometimes workstations. The first Celeron (Covington) was a Pentium II without a Level 2 cache, and suffered extremely poor performance, whereas the Pentium II Xeon had a large cache. Even now, both brands still exist—Celeron for the entry-level market (generally with a reduced cache and a slower FSB) and Xeon for servers (with a fast FSB, sometimes more cache, and high clock speeds).
Intel quickly added a cache to the Celeron with the Mendocino model (128 KB). The Celeron 300A is famous for its overclocking capacities, able to go 50% or more above its rated clock speed much of the time.
| Code name | Covington, Mendocino | Drake |
| Date released | 1998 | 1998 |
| Architecture | 32 bits | 32 bits |
| Data bus | 64 bits | 64 bits |
| Address bus | 32 bits | 36 bits |
| Maximum memory | 4 GB | 64 GB |
| L1 cache | 16 KB + 16 KB | 16 KB + 16 KB |
| L2 cache | 0 KB/128 KB (internal, CPU frequency) | external, 512 KB-2,408 KB (CPU frequency) |
| Clock frequency | 266-300 MHz/300-533 MHz | 400-450 MHz |
| FSB | 66 MHz | 100 MHz |
| FPU | built in | built in |
| SIMD | MMX | MMX |
| Fabrication process | 250 nm | 250 nm |
| Number of transistors | 7,500,000/19,000,000 | 7,500,000 + cache |
| Power consumption | 16–28 W | 30-46 W |
| Voltage | 2 V | 2 V |
| Die surface area | 131 mm²/154 mm² | 131 mm² + cache |
| Connector | Slot1/Socket 370 PPGA | Slot 2 |
Like the Pentium II, Xeon had an external L2 cache inside the processor cartridge. Its capacity was between 512 KB and 2 MB, and the number of transistors between 31 million and 124 million.
