X-bit labs

Celeron E1200: Dual-Core Processor Almost for Free

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/14/2008 | 05:11 PM ]

On January 20, 2008 Intel starts selling their first dual-core processor in the budget Celeron family. Will this cause a revolution in the low-end processor market? To answer this question we carried out an extensive test session of the newcomer in our today’s review.

Table of contents:

• Better Safe Than Sorry
  
• Closer Look at Celeron E1200
  
• Overclocking
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• 512KB Cache: Is It Really That Bad?
  
• Performance
  
• General Performance
  
• 3D Games
  
• Media Content Encoding
  
• Final Rendering
  
• Other Applications
  
• Conclusion
  

Last week we started talking about the new processors Intel launched to refresh their product line-up. We discussed the new Core 2 Duo E8000 processor family also known as Wolfdale. However, these processors based on new CPU cores manufactured with 45nm process are far not the only new CPUs that we will be talking about in the near future.

A little later the long awaited quad-core Yorkfield processors should arrive into the market, although in the meanwhile their mass supplies have been delayed for a couple of months. The changes will also happen in the low-end market segment. While the top of the price-list will be occupied by the 45nm processors, the older 65nm cores will be transferred to inexpensive CPUs priced below $150. As a result, we will definitely see new faster solutions in the Core 2 Duo E4000 and Pentium Dual-Core E2000 processor families.

But this is not all yet. Very soon we will witness another remarkable event: the launch of the first Celeron processors with two computational cores. So, the price of Intel dual-core solutions will drop to inappropriately low level of $50, which will indicate full and indisputable victory of the multi-core concept.

However, we shouldn’t hold only Intel responsible for introduction of dual-core CPUs into the budget segment of the processor market. AMD did it a little earlier, as their youngest Athlon 64 X2 CPUs have long been selling at ridiculously low prices. However, unlike AMD, whose processors have automatically become cheaper because they couldn’t compete against dual-core processors on Core micro-architecture, Intel introduced inexpensive dual-core CPUs on purpose having labeled them with the not very encouraging “Celeron” brand name.

Although Celeron processors have long been of no interest to computer enthusiasts, who regarded them as a temporary “socket cap”, the new dual-core Celeron processors seem to be able to change the situation dramatically. The thing is that this processor is based on Core micro-architecture (even though its core is manufactured with not the very latest 65nm process), which implies that it may perform and overclock pretty decently. Moreover, we know a lot of cases when Celeron processors appeared almost the best solution for overclocking. Could we be that lucky this time? To answer this question we undertook a small investigation of our own, which we are going to share with you today.