Celeron is nearing its end, it is being replaced by the Celeron D. This is much like the Sempron story on AMD’s budget platform, the far superior K8 Sempron is replacing the K7 Sempron. The Celeron is Intel’s budget processor, and has been for some time. Even though the name Celeron has stayed the same from the Pentium II days until the Prescott Pentium 4, a lot has changed. There has been a Pentium II Celeron, a Pentium III Celeron, and a Pentium 4 Celeron.

Since we are sticking with this generations processors, we will just stick to the Pentium 4 Celeron. With the Celeron, Intel basically take a fully fledged Pentium 4 and cripple certain parts of it. They cut down both the cache, and depending what core it is based off the FSB (but all Celerons run at the same FSB anyway, 400MHz).

But, if you are considering these processors for a budget system, don’t. They have very low performance. You may be thinking that someone who wants a budget processor doesn’t want performance, but also consider price. Lets do some more price comparisons:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (OEM)
Intel Celeron 2.6GHz

They are both around the same prices, with the Athlon XP a little cheaper. Now, look at this guide, skip to the benchmarks if you wish.

Not only is it a little cheaper, it blows the Celeron away. Now, as I mentioned in the AMD technology guide, Athlon XP is on the way out, so Sempron may be your only choice. But even though I put the K7 Sempron down, it will still crush a Celeron on every occasion. Considering that even a lowly Duron processor (worse than Sempron) can beat a 2.6GHz Celeron makes the Celeron seem pretty damn bad for the money.

To sum it up, Celeron: avoid.

Now here’s where Intel managed to fix themselves up: Celeron D. Celeron D is based off the Pentium 4 like the Celeron, but is based off the Prescott core. I will go into what makes this core better equipped for a budget processor in the core rundown.

When Celeron D was announced, people thought it would be even worse than the Celeron. This is because the main reason the Celeron is such a bad performer is because the cache is so low, the way Intel designs their chips means cache can make a huge difference, although when you reach 1MB cache on the Pentium 4’s going higher doesn’t make much difference. Anyway, because the Prescott core needed more cache, 1MB on Pentium 4’s, people thought the Celeron D would be in big trouble because it only comes with 256K. But, thanks to the improvements Intel made to the Prescott core the Celeron D didn’t turn out all that bad. It blew the Celeron away, and finally put the old Celeron to rest along with the benchmarks between the Celeron and AMD’s chips.

X-bit labs did some more benchmarks with this processor, which can be found here. As you can see, a major improvement over Celeron.

Not long after the Celeron D appeared, Sempron turned up, AMD’s new budget line. More benchmarks done by X-bit labs shown that the Celeron D was better value for money, when compared to the K7 Sempron. If you compare the K8 Sempron to the Celeron D, then it comes out in AMD’s favour though. If you can’t afford a socket 754 K8 Sempron system, then Celeron D is for you. If you can afford to go the socket 754 route, then you would be more pleased with the Sempron than the Celeron D.

So now we know about the different processors, but as you will now find out, a processor can be called the same thing but have different features. So onto the core rundown.