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I PREDICTED IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE that the trend toward sub-$1,000 PCs would hurt the computer industry. And it finally seems like there is not enough room in the sub-$1,000 segment (known as Segment Zero) for many more flops. Becuase the boat is cracking, and it may capsize soon.
Take Intel, for example. This week, the giant chipmaker will announce three chips, one of them the low-cost Celeron. The Intel Celeron is to be introduced as the chip of choice for cheap PCs. It is based on the same P6 and Slot 1 technology that the speedy Pentium II is based on. So it's got to be a home run, right?
Not so. Critics are already knocking the Celeron for being slow. In fact, according to industry sources such as PC World, the Celeron's performance is far less than chips from rivals AMD and Cyrix, not to mention the previous-generation Pentium MMX chip. Heck, even Intel's own performance results show that the Pentium MMX is faster than the Celron.
So what's wrong with the Celeron? In theory, it is just a 266-MHz Pentium II. But in reality, it is even slower than previous generation Pentium MMXs, because it is missing an L2 (Level 2) cache. The cache memory (known as SRAM) runs at higher speed than conventional main system memory (known as DRAM), allowing the chip to access the cache first before looking into slower main memory. As a result, the Celeron takes a huge performance hit. And don't think about upgrading to the faster Pentium II: The Micro ATX board that Celron uses won't house a Pentium II chip.
With all the problems with the Celeron, many large OEMs have decided either not to produce systems using the Celeron, or to produce the systems and not market it. Compaq, for example, is expected to announce a Celeron PC, but not market it aggressively, like the rest of its PCs. Meanwhile, Digital and IBM may skip Celeron entirely, supporting older Pentium MMX chips and K6 chips from rival AMD.
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