X-bit labs

Intel Celeron D CPU: Budget Processors from Intel Acquire Prescott Core (page 9)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/25/2004 | 06:15 AM ]

All in all, the situation looks rather favorable for the new Celeron D processors. First of all, you notice a big gap between them and the previous generation Celeron processors on Northwood core working at the same clock frequency. In fact, there is nothing surprising about it. As we know, Prescott core itself cannot ensure a performance increase, however, Celeron D has one more important trump: faster system bus. It is exactly what determines a significant advantage of the new Celeron processors over the old ones. However at the same time, the small L2 cache of the new Celeron D processors doesn’t allow these CPUs to compete with fully-fledged Pentium 4 solutions: in most cases Celeron D with 2.8GHz core frequency falls behind Pentium 4 CPUs with 533MHz bus and 2.4GHz core clock rate.

As for the performance of the Celeron D processor overclocked to 3.8GHz, it looks much more impressive I should say. Almost everywhere this processor demonstrates results comparable with those of Pentium 4 on Prescott core and 3GHz frequency. The only exceptions to this rule are Ton Raider: The Angel of Darkness and Aquamark3 test. The reasons lie in the gaming engines architecture, as they can use Hyper-Threading technology, so that the CPUs supporting Hyper-Threading look evidently better in these tests than Celeron D with Hyper-Threading disabled on the hardware level.

Although the introduction of new processor models in the Intel budget CPU family raised the performance to new heights, they are still unable to compete successfully enough with the budget solutions from AMD. For example in games Celeron D 335 working at 2.8GHz lost to AMD Athlon XP 2800+ costing the same money almost in every benchmark. Overclocking helps improve the situation for Celeron D a little bit: when working at 3.8GHz, this processor manages to outpace Athlon XP 3200+ in half the tests.

All in all, despite the evident improvements Intel made to its budget solutions, AMD Athlon XP remain a better choice for gaming systems, even though the performance gap between them and the new Intel CPUs got somewhat smaller today.