P4 Celeron Vs Tbred Duron @ Anandtech - ouch!

[malfunction]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927

Ouch - I wonder if Anandtech is on Intel 'kaka' list now?

[silent ben]

I always knew AMD were better than Intel, even though my mates have disowned me for saying so. Looks like some face rubbing is in order

Ben

[malfunction]

Originally posted by silent ben
I always knew AMD were better than Intel, even though my mates have disowned me for saying so. Looks like some face rubbing is in order

Ben

It's fair to say that the P4 Celeron is overly crippled. An interesting 'grey area' are the mobile P4 celerons - 256K cache so effectively a .13 micron Willamette P4. Got one on eBay recently for about £30 (1.5GHz) and it clocked up to 2.6GHz @ 1.5V (2625MHz - 175 * 15 and I think it was the mobo holding me back). I think the mobile celerons are the only true low low budget option for an intel system at the moment. (Though Intel have done something to the 865 and 875 chipsets - as they won't post with a mobile celeron - presumbably it's because they don't support willamette chips either...)

[spazman]

thats why ive never had an intel chip (ever)

[bledd]

the divx encoding test seems a bit off..

divx is all about mhz (and SSE2 -intel), i thought a celeron 2.6 would beat a xp2600 hands down? -unless they have SSE2 optimisations turned off, which would be damn stupid

[malfunction]

Originally posted by cky2k
the divx encoding test seems a bit off..

divx is all about mhz (and SSE2 -intel), i thought a celeron 2.6 would beat a xp2600 hands down? -unless they have SSE2 optimisations turned off, which would be damn stupid

I wondered about that - I've always read that encoding would be the only point of buying a desktop P4 celeron (as by it's nature you won't get any (many?) cache hits for the data being processed)

[Austin]

The P4 based Ceelrons are total carp, they don't even offer good perf for the price. A P4 2.0ghz and AthlonXP2000+ (1.67ghz) often beat a Celeron o/c'ed to 3.0ghz ... holding back the cache and FSB of the ever hungry P4 is a total waste. The Celery 1.7ghz could barely beat a Duron 1.3ghz which used 200FSB (as in 2x100mhz) and had a quarter of the Athlon's cache. Some links ...

CELERON 1.7ghz
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q2/020515/index.html

CELERON 2.0ghz (plus 3ghz o/c)
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20021016/index.html

[bledd]

austin,

as far as i was aware, the celerons are awesome for divx encoding, and thats about it.. (due to the SSE2 instructions they implement).

maybe they didn't have SSE2 enabled in the divx test that they carried out as i said above

divx encoding relies on pure mhz (SSE2 instructions also boost the performance).

am i wrong in assuming this?

[malfunction]

Originally posted by Austin
The P4 based Ceelrons are total carp, they don't even offer good perf for the price. A P4 2.0ghz and AthlonXP2000+ (1.67ghz) often beat a Celeron o/c'ed to 3.0ghz ... holding back the cache and FSB of the ever hungry P4 is a total waste. The Celery 1.7ghz could barely beat a Duron 1.3ghz which used 200FSB (as in 2x100mhz) and had a quarter of the Athlon's cache. Some links ...

CELERON 1.7ghz
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q2/020515/index.html

CELERON 2.0ghz (plus 3ghz o/c)
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20021016/index.html

Argh! Had composed a long reply but lost it due to accidental press of the back button...

Anyway - one point to take away is that in the article on Tom's the 3.0GHz / 600MHz / 128K celery is 10% quicker in the DivX test than the 2.66GHz / 533MHz / 512K P4 (in terms of clock speed and FSB the Celery it's 12.5% higher for both). The review doesn't actually say if the (DDR 400) mem is kept at the same speed for all tests - if it is though the increase in the FSB won't make much difference to the results so IMO you've got a 10% increase for 12.5% more MHz - not too bad a loss when you figure in the loss in that a theoretical 2.926GHz P4 and a 3.0GHz Celeron would be evenly matched in terms of the DivX test (only). Generally not good value for money though it might be a bit of fun to overclock - especially as there ought to be D1 stepping Celerons out there somewhere.

[bledd]

might get a 2.6 celly and overclock it.

forgot they were also good at mp3 encoding

mp3 and divx encoding mainly rely on sheer speed, (with SSE2 making them perform faster). i'm just gonna keep repeating myself :S

[Austin]

Okay so Most Celly that are 2.0ghz or faster should o/c to around 3.0ghz (all other factors permitting) but even then you get gaming perf INFERIOR to a P4 2.0ghz or XP2000+ (£40)! And when you consider XP2500+ (£60) which often o/c to XP3200+ it really makes the Celery totally carp ... even if all you tend to use your PC for is DivX/MP3 encoding. The ONLY reason I can think for going Celery is if you go Skt478 now in order to use a P4 at some point.

[bledd]

true, but they do run super cool, (you're gonna want a divx/mp3 that makes minimum noise).

dont get me wrong, i agree they're a pile o'crap for most things

[directhex]

the p4 architecture relies on large scale branch prediction, which requires bucketloads of cache (hence why the P4EE r0x so much).

celerons really are rather crippled, though tom's is hardly the place to go for reviews that don't have suitcases of cash involved at some point in the process

[Trickle]

Originally posted by cky2k
might get a 2.6 celly and overclock it.

It wont help the celeron for the reasons Directhex states. There was a guy on this forum near the start of the year who had a celeron clocked to 3ghz (albiet not on a 865 board) and it still performed worse than a £45 stock speed 1700+

Do they really run any cooler than a P4? P4's are barely any cooler than an athlon these days.

[td5]

Long 20 step pipe = more branch mispredictions = more stalls = more cache lookup's. Although where there's very little cache, and the P4's pipeline is constantly stalling....hay presto your left with a celery.

[unrealrocks]

Good to see AMDs slower lines are still not bad power and seeing as the 1.6Ghz Duron is like £35 its a proper bargin! That and a SK41 would be a good budget system!