Updated: Intel Celeron Waves Good Bye

According to reports coming from Far East, Intel is getting ready to simplify its offering into Atom, Pentium and Core brands. You’ve guessed it right, no more Celeron.

The legendary Celeron debuted in April 1998 as Celeron 266 and 300 [Covington core], but the cache-less [no L2 cache] processor suffered from terrible performance and Intel was told a clear no by OEMs of the time. The answer was a processor codenamed Mendocino, which featured 128KB L2 cache running at full rate. The processor known as the Celeron 300A became the first massively overclocked processor, given that it had no issues running at 100MHz Front Side Bus [remember that one?], instead of default 66MHz one. This was achieved simply by changing the FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz and the end result was: you buy 300MHz, get 50% more for free [450MHz].

In a way, we can call Intel Celeron 300A as the birthplace of enthusiast motherboard segment, which is now a multi-billion dollar business – Asus, GigaByte, MSI built their reputation on selling “Ferrari boards” and went from anonymous companies in Far East to the recognizable brands of today.

The final Celerons will be released during the current quarter [Back to School] with the production stopping at the beginning of 2011. From then onwards, the surviving Intel brands are Atom, Pentium and Core. Pentium will naturally, replace Celeron as the value, entry-level desktop and notebook processor line-up.

Update July 12, 2010 – In a statement given to Computerworld, Intel’s APAC PR Spokesman, Barry Sum stated that “The rumor is not true, Intel has no plan to phase out the Celeron brand in 2011. Intel Celeron processors continue to provide a low-cost computing solution for basic computing needs.”

Original Author: Theo Valich

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