[NEWS]- (deserved) Celeron-bashing article at Anandtech.

[CougTek]

The article is supposed to be a comparative review of budget processors, but the results are so much in favor of AMD that in the end, the article is more a warning against Celeron than anything else :

When we can find a 1.6GHz Duron for just over half the price of a 2.6GHz Celeron and get better performance consistently in almost every test we ran, the choice is clear.

It's obvious that the long pipeline of the Pentium 4 just can't handle the crippled cache of the Celeron. With more cache misses and pipeline stalls, the processor isn't getting as much useful work done as it is trying constantly to refill the pipeline. We are seeing these results for the same reason we saw the performance gains from the P4 Extreme Edition with its 2MB L3 cache: the pipeline needs to stay full for the P4 to really shine.

The Pentium III based Celerons offered, at one time, acceptable performance. However, it is clear that in the value segment today, Intel has nothing to offer but a high clock speed.

I knew Intel's budget CPU was bad, but I wasn't thinking it was that much. Shameful.

BTW, some will probably note that the other hardware components used in this test were very high-end for a review of low-cost processors, but those fast components were certainly used to avoid having severe bottlenecks elsewhere than on the CPU so that the benchmarks really measure the performances of the processors and not those of other system parts.

News source

 

[Tannin]

"I knew Intel's budget CPU was bad, but I wasn't thinking it was that much."

Yup. My thoughts exactly.

By the way, have you noticed that everything graphic at Anand is now either (a) advertising or (b) Flash?

I guess they don't want people using the graphs - though it's so easy to do so via screenshot that I don't know why they bother.

 

[Mercutio]

I keep thinking I'm going to buy a new laptop but all the subnotebooks I find have those asstastical Celerons in 'em.

Has anyone else tried the new Duron 1600 chips? I saw 'em on newegg for $40 and bought a couple. In terms of raw performance they really do appear to equal standard-issue XP1600s (at least in my all-important dvd shrink tests).

 

[blakerwry]

omg, anandtech sucks...