by Ilya Gavrichenkov
03/05/2002 | 07:53 AM
We received a word about Intel’s intention to undertake a highly aggressive promotion of the new budget Celeron line as it migrates to NetBurst architecture. By the end of the year Intel will stop producing all Celeron CPUs based on Tualatin-256 with Pentium III architecture. They’ll give way to new Celeron processors with Willamette-128 die.
As we reported, in May, parallel to the introduction of 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus in Pentium 4 CPUs, Intel is about to strengthen the value Celeron CPU line as well - it will migrate to the Pentium 4 architecture. New Celeron CPUs will be based on 0.18-micron Willamette die with a reduced L2 cache (128KB) and 400MHz bus. The first Celeron (Willamette-128) scheduled for May will be clocked at 1.7GHz. Later, in the Q’3, Celeron (Willamette-128) clock frequency will reach 1.8GHz, in the Q’4 it will be 1.9GHz and 2.0GHz in the beginning of 2003. New Celeron (Willamette-128) CPUs will soon replace the old Celeron (Tualatin-256) models with the maximum frequency frozen at 1.4GHz in the beginning of the Q’2 of 2002. <%BANNER[article]%>
In order to make the migration to new Celeron CPUs as fast as possible, Intel will resort to its favorite method. It will offer platforms with high-frequency CPUs at low prices. 1.7GHz will surely attract the buyers, and such platforms will be sold at about $700 shortly after the announcement of Willamette-128 and in the Q’3 the price will fall till $600.
To be more exact, at launch Celeron (Willamette-128) 1.7GHz CPUs will be prices at only $83, while Celeron (Willamette-128) 1.8GHz due two months later will be priced at only $103. These are really low prices, especially if we remember Celeron (Tualatin) 1.4GHz due in April of 2002 will cost $99, and by the announcement of Celeron (Willamette-128) 1.7GHz they’ll be priced down to only $89. So, Intel will sell Celeron (Willamette-128) CPUs even cheaper than elder Celeron (Tualatin) models.
As for mainboards for the new Celeron CPUs, Intel will release a special cheap integrated chipset so that to make the boards’ price adequate to these CPUs. The new chipset based on i845G design with PC133 SDRAM and PC2100 DDR SDRAM support, will work with 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus, support USB 2.0 and will have a high-quality embedded graphics engine. The performance of his core will be comparable with Geforce2 MX400. Besides, it will provide high-quality 2D graphics and will be equipped with 350MHz RAMDAC. It is expected that manufacturers of i845GL based boards will make use of the engine’s abilities to work with external frame buffer installed on the board. As the graphics performance of i845GL based boards may turn out even higher than that of i845G graphics engines intended for Pentium 4 CPUs. However, the most important issue is that i845GL chipsets shipped to the mainboard makers will cost only $32. This let us hope that new mainboards will be prices at less than $100.