Intel Steps Up Plans For Its Celeron Chip

June 08, 1998 (7:49 AM EDT)

Intel accelerated the road map for its Celeron chip, and will announce details of a 300-MHz Celeron chip June 8, company officials said.

The analyst community has scrutinized the performance of Intel's (company profile) first Celeron, a 266-MHz chip for low-cost computers that was introduced in April. Because the current Celeron design does not have Level 2 cache, which is a special type of high-speed memory, it is considerably slower in performance than Pentium II chips with comparable clock speeds.

The 266-MHz Celeron, for example, is on par with an older Intel chip, the 233-MHz Pentium MMX. The 300-MHz Celeron will offer a slight improvement, with a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in clock speed over the previous generation of the chip.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel had initially planned to offer a considerably faster 300-MHz Celeron with L2 cache later this year. Instead, the company will offer a chip without cache, but a faster clock speed now, and a 300-MHz Celeron with cache in the fourth quarter, a spokeswoman said.

All the major PC vendors are expected to offer systems based on the 300-MHz Celeron in low-cost PCs next month. Dell, for example, plans to offer a system featuring the new chip in early July, company executives said last week.