Intel Celeron Performance Guide – THG.RU

Introduction

Almost two years ago, in August 1998, Intel introduced the Celeron processor based on the popular Mendocino core. Its predecessor (Covington) came with the Pentium II Deschutes core, but without using any L2 cache memory. That’s why the first generation Celeron processors were rather slow and unsuccessful. On March 29 of this year, Intel introduced two more Celeron processors, clocked at 566 and 600 MHz. These new models are equipped with Intel’s latest core (Coppermine) but come with only 128 Kbytes of full speed L2 cache (instead of the Pentium III’s 256 KBytes), making them really interesting again. Moreover, all new Celeron CPUs also include Intel’s SSE extensions. With applications supporting this proprietary standard, you will get some extra performance.

As you can read in the review of the AMD Duron processor, the Celeron cannot hold up to its competition from AMD. Nevertheless, lots of users have been thinking about getting a new Celeron CPU (533A or faster), as it was believed to run at 100 MHz FSB just as well. Now some users are speculating on getting a fast Celeron processor. Even though the Celeron is still officially limited to 66 MHz and its main competitor, the Duron, is considerably faster, it is still an inexpensive and fast processor. Moreover, Celeron is best suited for upgrading and overclocking.

66 MHz System Speed

As a low cost product, the Celeron is of course not supposed to reach Pentium III performance. To ensure this, Intel limits its L2 cache to 128 KBytes and its FSB to only 66 MHz. Nevertheless, most Celeron CPUs can be overclocked to 75 or 83 MHz, resulting in a core clock as well nas performace icrease of 13% (75 MHz) or 26% (83 MHz). It is sometimes even possible to run some CPUs at 100 MHz system clock, resulting in a 50% higher core clock speed!

Usually, you will be able to get the Celerons between 300A and 466 MHz running at 92 – 100 MHz FSB, giving you an even more excellent price/performance ratio. The new Celerons 533A and 566 turn out to be able coping with up to 100 MHz system speed as well, getting their core speed up to 800 and 850 MHz.

66 MHz system speed is not going to be a real disadvantage, as the performance of mid-class Celeron CPUs is still sufficient for most applications. As a matter of fact, it is still the graphics card that prevents us from being able to enjoy high resolutions. Please take a look at the CPU scaling benchmarks of Tom’s GeForce 2 GTS review. It makes quite clear that a Celeron is still fast enough for most games. As long as the fill rate or memory bandwidth of a graphics card is the bottleneck, people with low budget should spend their money in a fast graphics card rather than in a CPU. Please read Tom’s article about 3D benchmarking to learn more about this topic.

Celeron vs. Pentium III

Computers are fast becoming as normal as televisions today, which is why you often can find several ones in today’s households. In recent times, the Internet was of course the main contributor to this evolvement. Lots of our readers are business people, computer freaks or individuals dealing with computers as a hobby. But a large part of today’s users cannot or simply do not want to spend $2000 on a PC. That’s why the low-end market has been growing considerably over the last years. And it is also the main reason why Intel is offering a declared low-end CPU like their Celeron. AMD was able to sell huge amounts of K6, K6-2 and K6-III processors, even though they had never been a threat to Intel’s high performance products. The sales volumes of low end processors cannot be justified by their great performance, but by the fact that these chips provide enough performance for non-3D applications like word processing, spread sheets, presentations, webdesign and similar software.

The Celeron does not differ very much from its big brother, the Pentium III, but there is one safe way – besides the labeling – to distinguish them:

The left processor is the Pentium III. It comes with more capacitors.

Celeron vs. Pentium III, Continued

The following table shows the differences between the Pentium III Coppermine and the Celeron.

As you can see in this table, the practical differences can be reduced to the following:

• The Pentium III as well as the Celeron 533A and up use the same core
• The Pentium III runs at 100 or 133 MHz system speed, while all Celerons are officially restricted to 66 MHz only. As the multipliers have only been defined up to x8.0, smaller multipliers had to be ‘recycled’:
  
  x4.5 will work as x8.5 (Pentium III 850, Celeron 566)
  
  x5.0 will work as x9.0 (Celeron 600)
  
  x5.5 will work as x9.5 (Celeron 633)
  
  x6.0 will work as x10.0 (Celeron 667)

• The Celeron is equipped with only 128 KByte L2 Cache
• All new Celeron CPUs require 1.5V core voltage, while Pentium III models run at 1.60 or 1.65V (1.70V in case of the 933 and 1000 MHz version).

What both FC-PGA processors have in common is that they are very fragile. First, the plastic package makes the whole CPU lightweight. Second, the die is now exposed directly at the top of the processor. Thanks to this flip-chip technique, the heat sink will have direct contact to the die without the formerly used heat plate. This byproduct of high clock speeds is of course extremely important with respect to proper cooling.

Upgrading from the old to a new Celeron may be an interesting issue as well. In theory, every new Celeron should work in most Socket 370 motherboards. But as many motherboard companies did not implement low voltage support (down to 1.5V), lots of older boards can only be equipped with the Celeron 533 max (requiring 2.0V). The CPU multiplier cannot be changed for some years now, so the only two issues for upgrading are, first, the availability of a new BIOS, supporting the new Celeron and second, the support of 1.5 V core voltage . Information on both should be available at the website of your motherboard manufacturer.

i810/i810E

Naturally, Intel wants to address both the performance and the low end market. In order to reduce system costs, customers with low performance demands are suggested to combine the Celeron processor with an i810 motherboard. The i810 chipset comes with all features required by a standard business computer: Intel’s fancy hub architecture, Integrated 2D/3D graphics, UltraDMA/66 IDE interface, AC97 sound system, two USB ports and support for 66, 100 (i810) and 133 MHz FSB (i810E).

As you can imagine, the integrated graphics controller is both a benefit and a big handicap. On the one hand, you basically do not need a graphics card any more, as the chipset takes over all graphics functions. In addition, the graphics logic of the chipset is able to make use of the main memory. This solution is very inexpensive indeed. However, we can only recommend i810 for computers that will never be used for demanding graphic applications or 3D games! As you will see later, the performance of Intel’s integrated graphics really beggars belief.

Test Configuration

Old Celeron vs. new Celeron

The left one is the old Celeron PPGA. On the right you see the new Celeron with Coppermine core and ISSE. As you can imagine, there is hardly any performance difference between the old and the new cores, unless you are using applications that benefit from SSE. Please take a look at the following graphs.

Old Celeron vs. new Celeron: Scaling

As you can see, the performance advantage of the Celeron 566 over the “old” Celeron 533 is exactly as we would expect it. There are no performance jumps.

Here you can see clearly that 33 MHz higher CPU clock generates 4 SYSmark points or approximately 5 to 6% more performance. The Celeron models between 366 and 533 MHz scale fairly in line. Now see the jump between the 533 and 566 MHz model: The step is 11 SYSmark points or approximately 11% more system performance. Obviously, the software used by Sysmark 2000 benefits from the SSE instruction set of the new Celerons, as the game benchmarks did not run faster at all, unable to take any advantage of the Streaming SIMD Extensions.

Benchmarks

I ran all Celeron benchmarks first on the Asus CUWE-RM, which is an i810E motherboard (integrated graphics controller), and then on the Asus CUBX motherboard plus nVIDIA’s TNT2/Ultra reference card, as I wanted to show you the Celeron’s performance with an inexpensive graphics card.

Our results show clearly that the i810 graphics controller is really fast enough for office applications under Windows. Intel marketing specialists would now say something like “look, our i810 is as fast as other graphics solutions!” I think the result don’t hold surprise, as graphic chips have reached the maximum of 2D acceleration years ago. Further performance gains are only very minor. Let’s now take a look at the game benchmarks though.

Celeron – Expendable

Expendable benefits much more from the faster graphics card. And it runs faster with every Megahertz now.

Celeron – Quake III Arena

In Quake III, the performance increase between every speed grade becomes even bigger. At 366 MHz, the TNT2/Ultra is 15% faster than Intel’s i810 integrated solution. With a Celeron 600, the nVIDIA chip provides 40% higher frame rates than i810. Using one of the fastest Pentium III models (850 MHz) with the TNT2 Ultra will give you more than double the frame rate than with Intel’s 3D deccelerator. I think it’s not necessary to mention that every GeForce card will produce even better results.

Celeron vs. Pentium III – SYSmark 2000

To show the performance differences between the Celeron and the Pentium III, I decided to give you the real difference instead of the naked benchmark numbers.

Please consider that I produced the results using a Celeron 566 (66 x8.5) and a Pentium III 850, clocked at 66 instead of 100 MHz FSB. Bryce, Excel, Paradox and Powerpoint run faster by 15-23%, while most others gain between 4 and 9%. Remember that the only difference in this comparison is the L2 cache size and possibly a different cache interface.

Celeron vs. Pentium III – Content Creation Winstone 2000

There is little difference in ZD’s Content Creation Benchmark. It contains the following software: Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6, Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5. I would have liked to give you results of each program, but CC Winstone provides only one result.

Celeron vs. Pentium III – Game Benchmarks

Again, the chart is able to show the real performance advantage of the Pentium III over its little brother Celeron in both gaming benchmarks.

Processor Performance Charts: SYSmark 2000

Here you have a complete performance chart of all current Intel processors. Even though the Celerons are the slowest processors, they still provide enough performance for almost all kind of standard applications. SYSmark results of 200 (with high end hardware or overclocked systems) may be quite cool, but you won’t benefit from this when working on a presentation. Even a Pentium II 300 provides enough performance for the majority of such purposes.

Processor Performance Charts: Expendable Timedemo

The performance issue is a bit different if you are a 3D gamer. The chart contains the benchmark results at 640×480, as we wanted to show the difference between all those processors. Expendable is a very CPU demanding benchmark, so that the playability will depend on your CPU – the faster, the better. But usually a Celeron 566 and a GeForce card provide enough performance for most Direct3D games at 1024x768x16 and up. Getting a super fast Pentium III will raise your frame rates at low resolutions, but it won’t improve the playability if in any major way.

Processor Performance Charts: Quake III Arena

Quake III is a bit different from Expendable, as it requires much faster graphics cards. That’s why an average CPU like the Celeron and a fast graphics card (e.g. GeForce or GeForce 2) is a much better choice than a fast CPU (Pentium III 700+) with an average graphics card (TNT2, Matrox G400 MAX, S3 Savage 2000 etc.).

Celeron Price/Performance Index

Maybe you remember the first price/performance index back in May when we took a look at the Pentium III. I did exactly the same this time, with actual CPU prices from pricewatch.com.

I created the index values as follows: Quake III Benchmark results as seen on the pages before / CPU price (average CPU price from pricewatch.com). To get better results, I multiplied the result with 100.

You can see that all Celeron CPUs provide most performance for your money. Of course you won’t get exciting frame rates, but it will be enough for most games.

Conclusion

I think most of you have already read Tom’s review of the new AMD Duron processor, which is meant to be Celeron’s competitor. As you can see in the Duron benchmarks, this new AMD processor beats the Celeron in every benchmark and positions itself just below the Pentium III. However, we are not comparing the Celeron to the Duron, but merely the low-cost solution Celeron to the official high-end chip Pentium III. Although Duron seems to be preferable low-cost solution today, Celeron could be interesting in the following cases:

• for people who want to upgrade from a Pentium II (233-333 MHz) without exchanging motherboard and RAM as well.
• for people who have large amounts of PC66 SDRAM memory
• for people who cannot afford expensive components
• for people who want to get a cheap CPU now and upgrade to a fast Pentium III later

Even though the Duron provides superior performance to the Celeron for the same price, the AMD processor requires a new KT133 motherboard and at least PC100 memory. At this point, most KT133 motherboards cost more than platforms for Celeron or Pentium III processors based on VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset. That’s why many people might prefer to upgrade their Pentium II or old Celeron system with a new Celeron processor.

One very interesting issue regarding the Celeron is its overclocking capability, which was left out of this article intentionally. We are already dealing with part two of this article, which will focus on this issue exclusively.