Celeron and Xeon: Intel Aims At The High/Low End
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: intel, cpu, history
Celeron and Xeon: Intel Aims At The High/Low End
At the end of the 1990s, Intel launched two of its best-known processor brands: Celeron and Xeon. The former was aimed at the budget market and the latter at servers, and sometimes workstations. The first Celeron (Covington) was a Pentium II without a Level 2 cache, and suffered extremely poor performance, whereas the Pentium II Xeon had a large cache. Even now, both brands still exist—Celeron for the entry-level market (generally with a reduced cache and a slower FSB) and Xeon for servers (with a fast FSB, sometimes more cache, and high clock speeds).
Intel quickly added a cache to the Celeron with the Mendocino model (128 KB). The Celeron 300A is famous for its overclocking capacities, able to go 50% or more above its rated clock speed much of the time.
| Code name | Covington, Mendocino | Drake |
| Date released | 1998 | 1998 |
| Architecture | 32 bits | 32 bits |
| Data bus | 64 bits | 64 bits |
| Address bus | 32 bits | 36 bits |
| Maximum memory | 4 GB | 64 GB |
| L1 cache | 16 KB + 16 KB | 16 KB + 16 KB |
| L2 cache | 0 KB/128 KB (internal, CPU frequency) | external, 512 KB-2,408 KB (CPU frequency) |
| Clock frequency | 266-300 MHz/300-533 MHz | 400-450 MHz |
| FSB | 66 MHz | 100 MHz |
| FPU | built in | built in |
| SIMD | MMX | MMX |
| Fabrication process | 250 nm | 250 nm |
| Number of transistors | 7,500,000/19,000,000 | 7,500,000 + cache |
| Power consumption | 16–28 W | 30-46 W |
| Voltage | 2 V | 2 V |
| Die surface area | 131 mm²/154 mm² | 131 mm² + cache |
| Connector | Slot1/Socket 370 PPGA | Slot 2 |
Like the Pentium II, Xeon had an external L2 cache inside the processor cartridge. Its capacity was between 512 KB and 2 MB, and the number of transistors between 31 million and 124 million.
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Wasn’t one of the key features of the Pentium Pro line of processors the increase in IRQs to 256 rather than the 16 of the previous generations?
In the days of virtual IRQs assigned by windows it's easy to forget the headache of trying to install multiple interface cards without running out of resources.
am I mistaken? or the Maximum memory figures are wrong? 4096MB or is it KB on 386, 486 and Pentium MMX class CPU's. and 64MB on P-II and so on.
Modern Intel CPU: P1-> P3 -> P4M -> C2D -> C2Q
Modern AMD CPU: P1(Intel) -> P3(Intel) -> K8 -> K10
Next gen CPU: Modified P1
The Pentium 1 & 3 are possibly the most widely base processor in modern computing. Even AMD's chips are based on them.
Hmm....
Interesting...AMD chips based on P3... EHEHEHEHHEHEHE
I think you need a...khhmmm...LIFE
cheers
Nice article that made me a little bit misty-eyed and nostalgic (being of the original 8086 generation)
Did a bit of a clear-out of my parts boxes not so long ago and found a couple of PPro's, a 486DX2/66, a 386SX and a 386DX. Threw them out but perhaps should have built a little shrine? ;p
Cheers.
There are some errors in the article, Pentium M Dothan had a 2.26GHz model which is not mentioned there, they had a VCore of 1.356V and a TDP of 27W, not 36W like stated here, also it's die size is 88mm2, not 87mm2, it also came as a socket 478 which was incompatible with the Pentium 4 socket 478 due to it's electrical differences.