CPU

Will The Pentium Become The New Celeron?

Low end shoppers beware

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

30th of July 2007, 14:26 GMT

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Intel is one of the most important players on the computer hardware market having reached a position where all its decisions are greatly affecting the market and the other producers and vendors. As a result of its importance, Intel product names are well known on the IT market. Maybe the best known Intel product names are the Pentium and the Celeron as they represented for many years the spear head of the processor technology. Pentium was traditionally reserved for the high end products, while the slower Celeron was the name for the low and middle

end processors aimed mainly to budget conscious customers. Even if those two names were so well known, Intel discontinued their use sometime ago, dropping them in favor of more explicit product names.

But it seems that at least the Pentium name may come back for a while at least to give the name for the new low end Intel processors. So we can assume the Intel decided to shelve for the time being at least the Celeron name. As the Pentium name was always much more popular than the Celeron, it makes sense for Intel to keep active the Pentium brand even if it will only be associated with low end products from now on. The new Pentium processor will be shipped in two distinct variants, running at 1.6GHz for the E2140 model and 1.8GHz for the E2160 one. Both processor models are based on the aging but still not really obsolete dual core architecture and will be shipped in the standard blue box typical for the Core 2 Duo processors.

There are no differences apart from running clock speed between the two Pentium models, the E2140 and E2160. They are based on the same "Conroe" core architecture and have a reduced level 2 cache size of 1MB running at full processor speed. A 800MHz frontside bus, coupled with the widespread 775 processor socket and the low 1.35V core voltage might turn the new Pentiums into a hit on the low end market. A number of newer Intel technologies are implemented like Intel Speedstep and C1E, while the extended multimedia instruction set includes SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and Execute Disable coupled with the Intel 64-bit technology. Parsing the feature list of these processors we can see that Intel is in fact offering a cut down version of the Core 2 Duo, as the Pentiums lack the full level 2 cache and they are running at reduced clock speeds and FSBs.

According to the site CP65 benchmark testing shows a solid Pentium performance, being only 10 percent slower than the entry level Intel Core 2 Duo. Being priced at $95, the Pentium is much cheaper than its bigger brothers and because of its rather high performance it looks like a winner for the budget processor market.

TAGS:

Intel | Pentium | Celeron | dual core | Conroe

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