CPUs - AMD Athlon, Intel Centrino, Celeron, Pentium M

muddyfox470

lipidicman wrote:

So Celerons 'are a waste of money' according to you, because of things 'that you shouldn't worry about'?

Celerons are a waste of money ask anyone.

They are based on the older Pentium 4 Platforms, except the newer Celeron D (based on the prescott core).

They are lazy chips that aren't much use other than for word processing and general tasks. - Web browsing etc.

Some of the earlier Celerons (of this generation) were out performed by the Pentium 3s.

Basically a celeron is a crippled Pentium 4, which already has a moderately bad architecture (compared to AMDs) - they run hot, and have to run very high with a large cache to compensate for all this.

Thus take away the cache from the Pentium 4 and well you are looking at a processor that cannot keep up (in competition) with the older AMD Athlons etc. Maybe saying they were a waste of money was over exagerration, they are fine for simple tasks, but if you want a performance processor with good all round performance, don't plump for the celeron. They are probably good if you are on a very tight budget, but i would always advise spending that bit more to get a P4 or AMD instead of a Celeron (my personal opinion)

Ian

EDIT: Admittedly the two different CPUs are built on entirley different architectures. So their reliance on the FSB and Cache, and also the Clock Spped is very different. The AMD platform is able to consume less power and work more efficiently (and at lower temperatures) because it has been engineered much better. The current pentium platform has long pipelines which suit it to video encoding (which can be proved in any benchmark) and this is where AMD lose out. However the Pentium allows for much higher clock speed and their FSB and Cache are used differently (architecturally) than the AMD.

Anyway i better stop before people get overly confused.

lipidicman

I was only pointing out that the reason a celeron is 'crippled' is the lower cache and slower fsb (compared to the pentium core on which it is based). So these things do matter (when comparing chips with similar architecture, if not you have introduced another variable which makes comparisons difficult)

That said, I would rather have a Pentium than a Celeron and I prefer the AMD chips (just not some of the MOBO chipsets) so I agree with you on most counts...

Take it easy.

and if the Original Poster wants to post what he needs his machine to do we can give him some real world advice........like 'a Celeron will cope with that' or 'You need the baddest, fastest, most overclocked-liquid nitrogen-cooled cutting edge rig ever'

shrek101

I disagree that the pentiums run hot. I have 2 celerons and 2 pentium 4, all are over clocked and run on stock coolers. I have Northwood P 1.8@2.4 and Pentium 4 2.4@3.1, if they were running so hot they wouldn't be over clocked. In fact they run cool and one is on 24/7 as a server.

I agree the celeron's are crippled pentiums, but they run pretty good and certainly good for most operations, even demanding applications. I can run latest games and encode DivX for backup which are quiet demanding on the cpu. I disagree that there are only just good for word processors, and my evidence is backed on my own experince over many years.

At the end of the day you get what you paid for I have had AMD's in the past as they run hot in comparison to Intel. I agree they are more efficient than Intel processors and the Sempron is meant to be slightly faster than the equivalent celerons.

wolfman

The Pentium 4 Northwood core isn't too bad for heat. I had a 2.4Ghz one and it was always in and around the 40C mark. In fact most earlier Pentiums are fine, it's the latest Prescott Pentiums that have issues. You'll find them running nearer 50-60C depending upon your case, cpu cooler etc... They use up a lot of power too.

In comparison, AMD's are generally the other way round. It's the latest AMD64's that run much cooler. My 3500+ barely breaks 30C (I have a decent cooler) but my friends never breaks 38C and he has the stock heatsink/fan. They also use much less power than the Pentium Prescott's.

terrymats

I've been out of hardware for over 2 years now. But I can explain the basic difference....

AMD & Intel are complete different brands. You also have another one called Cyrix. Maybe some more. Centrino is a processor from Intel that uses less power and give out less heat. As a result, laptops can use a battery with less capacity and it thereby gets lighter in weight. Intel P4 uses the most power & gives out more heat as it is the most powerful processor. As a result needs more battery power and thereby making laptops heavier as they need a heavy duty battery compared to Centrino. However, if you go for Centrino, you will compromise for power as compared to the weight of your laptop. I believe AMD Duon & Sempron would be the same as Intel Pentium III & IV. Upgrades bringing new names.

Celeron from Intel is another low priced processor with enhanced functions like of its sisters like P4. but with less power. Hence they come cheaper.

Not sure about front side bus. I've studied electronics, but i'm out of touch.

Cache is simple. Its memory built into the processor for accessing data quickly for quicker processing. Say a program like the explorer.exe (Windows Shell) may be resident in the processor cache as it is the heart of the OS and needs to be accessed ever so frequently. So, rather than going all the way through the cables to the hard disk or to the RAM, processors have their own cache memory. Consider it an inbuilt RAM of the processor. Generally, you will expect 256 KB cache. More the cache, better the performance of the processor.

Like I said, I've been out for 2 years, maybe i'm wrong and someone can correct me.

Thanks
Terry

shrek101

I agree wolfman. Looks like the orginal poster has made another post.

blinky

P4's and Celeron's benefit more than AMD64's from an increase in cache. The Intel Netburst architecture, which the P4 processors use is optimised for bandwidth. AMD's are optimised for low latency (speed). As a sort-of analogy P4's like roads with lots of lanes, AMD works best with fast cars. This is also why P4's show greater gains with dual channel RAM than the AMD's

It does get complicate with bus speeds and cache size (also cache speeds). Even Intel is using codes to describe the processors (which they spent years saying were meaningless.

The Pentium-M and Celeron-M processors are completely different beasts to P4's. Technically they are closer to the PIII but on an equal clock speed they are faster than a P4. It is strongly rumoured that future processors are going to be based on them. The true mobile versions of the P4, the P4-M, is about be discontinued. The situation is even more complicated for laptops as some manufacturers put desktop P4's in their machines.

CrazyChemist_2

Thank you so much everyone for replying in so much detail :beer: It is very helpful.

However, I will need a processor capable of processing digital images from a digital camera (~4 Megapixel) and also some high performance games such as Flight Sim and other similar games.

I currently have a P3 800Mhz but it seems to be running so slowly. I have no idea why this is, but I did increase the RAM from 128 to 196MB, which doesn't seem to have done a lot. I didn't upgrade any more as I am not sure whether it is worth spending cash on this one or just ditching it and going for a new one. I would prefer to stay with this one, but is there a way to make it run like it did when new?? I have searched it for spyware and found nothing but it still runs so much more slowly than when new.

Also I need a laptop anyway for the uses mentioned above, but assistance on my PC problem would be appreciated. :cool:

£$&*"($£&(

Just to stress what Blinky said - Celeron-M are completely different animals to other Celerons. They are very good in comparison to Pentium-Ms. The main difference is the cache which is half the size but plenty big enough. For a cheap laptop they are a very good choice. Lumping all Celerons into the bad catergory just means you need to do more research. I wouldn't touch Celeron-Ds unless it was really cheap and though they are improved they are weaker than the cheaper AMD Semprons.

sra

I've just merged these duplicate threads together

Hope they're still understandable