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Intel

Intel Cuts Prices, Reveals Details of New Celeron 69

Posted by Roblimo from the moore's-law-in-action dept.
Chacham sent us some interesting Intel tidbits from Yahoo! News: First, they're cutting prices on P-II and P-IIIs between 26% and 41% (depending on model) tomorrow. Second, this October they plan to release a new line of 600 MHz+ Celerons using their recently-developed 0.18 micron manufacturing process, which isn't "new" news, but the referenced article goes into more detail than previous ones on the subject so it's worth a quick scan.
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Intel Cuts Prices, Reveals Details of New Celeron More

Intel Cuts Prices, Reveals Details of New Celeron

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  • proper link (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here's the proper link methinks: Good link [yahoo.com] (That is if I can get the syntax right...)
  • Noted and fixed. Thanks.
  • Well, _I_ double checked that it all worked. :-)

    He seems to have edited my story and missed a small point. The extra words "First,they're a href=" was from my story.

    Not a complaint. Just clearing my side. :-)

  • Absolutely! If Athelon had performed poorly in benchmarks, Intel would have never cut it's prices.

    The next thing to look at is how 1GHz cooled Athelon systems (from Kryotech, with AMD's blessing IIRC) affect Intel's policy on overclocking.

  • Well some Taiwan company will soon bless us with a flip-chip to PPGA adaptor. You didn't need to be a prophet to know Intel was going to dump the PPGA format when Abit introduced the BP6. That motherboard must have cost Intel a lot of money. As for improved heat dissipation. Yeah, right, whatever. The only performance increase for Intel is the performance decrease of dual Celeron motherboards. At least until the BP7 comes out we'll have 133Mhz overclocks.
  • The article was saying that AMD will introduce a new low-end chip based on the Athlon core. This new chip will be cheaper than a regular Athlon, but crippled in some way (as Intel did by removing cache from the first Celerons).
  • As the guy before me said, it is possible to use flip chip design in a PPGA package. What I'm wondering about is if these new Celerons will indeed fit into any regular socket 370 board. The article seems to suggest they will but doesn't give details. There are socket 370 boards with the 440BX, ZX-100 or 810 chipsets that could support 100 Mhz Celerons just fine, but up till now socket 370 was strictly a 66 Mhz platform.

    I'll be interested to see if the new Celerons can be used in older boards. Intel isn't always considerate when it comes to backward compatibility, and they gotta sell new chipsets too.. although credit where credit is due, with the Celeron itself they came up with a fine upgrade path for old LX Pentium II boards. Anyhow, I'm hopeful that I'll eventually be able to replace the overclocked 550 Mhz Celerons on my dual slot 1 BX board, something like an 800 Mhz Celeron II might provide a good boost. I've recently learned here that I should use the Fraunhofer encoder so I'm once again waiting for my PC.

  • Great! (Score:1)

    by kwisti ( 3220 )
    Of course innovation and price slashes always make going after the latest technologies at the lowest possibly price a little challenging....but hey. I'll take a good deal any day!
  • ..or so it says in the article. I thought Athlon was a direct competitor to the PIII, being up to 40% faster at floating-point and 8% faster at integer?

    What are these people saying? I thought Athlon was soon going to be 750MHz and faster?

    Good bye Celery.
  • That's pretty amazing. Not just the fact that he manages to do it, but also that he has the confidence to even try it!
    ---
  • I have heard that sometimes, CPU makers get round the problem of low yields from cache by making two versions of a chip, one with cache and one without. The versions without cache are just those where the cache failed quality control, and has been disabled. If only part of the cache is flawed, you can disable just that part and produce a low-end version with smaller cache.

    I heard that a particular 386 clone which came in two versions, with 4KB and 8KB cache, used this technique. The 4KB version was identical to the more expensive chip, but with half the cache disabled.
  • Oh come *on,* don't talk wet!

    Intel specifically designed two separate lines with different characteristics to cover more of the market; it's been doing this even since the 386sx was devised.

    The Celeron was intended to be the cheap entry-level job, as Cyrix and AMD were doing too well out of the entry-level sector. It worked. As fab techonlogy improves, there probably will be more integrated caches and fewer compromises like backside and half-clock L2, but Intel will just come up with something else to demarcate its product lines.

    Get real. And be glad that there IS a sinple bodge to overcome one of the handicaps.
  • No great or unexpected news there, then, and nothing on when to expect 100MHz FSB Celerons...

    The only unexpected thing, in fact, was how amazingly badly-written that article was. Lousy punctuation, grammar, and a strong impression that the author didn't really understand what he was reporting on. Bit crap for a major news service, really.

    Hell, it was almost down to Newsbytes' level.
  • Will these new Celerons have the processor serial number burned-in?

    --
  • Right on schedule, an Intel price cut to coincide with the rollout of machines with AMD's latest processor. It's so routine by now that companies probably plan their Intel-based hardware budgets based on AMD chip rollout timetables.

    Given what this sort of price cutting does to spur PC sales, it's probably in software companies' interest to throw money at AMD to prop them up for a few more years just to keep the pressure on Intel.
  • i managed to find this info about dual celerons [w-w.ne.jp]. it mentions some crazy stuff about having to drill certain pins out and rewiring stuff on the chip. If you look near the bottom of the page, you'll find info about how to get dual celerons w/o drilling or crazy (fun?) chip-work. =)
  • If Intel is dropping the price of the PII 450 from $230 to $183, how come on pricewatch I can get them for $180 now? Are these guys loosing money on these sales?
  • I agree with the first part "the main reason people upgrade is for gaming sake" but disagree with your second part "90% of computers are used for gaming" -- most computer sold are used for shitty office work. Every business has computers, and many businesses have a computer for each employee-- even if it is a 'cash register' type computer. Every home does not have a computer, especially in non-upper/middle class areas.

    Office computers are generally so poorly equipped that they can't be used to play games (except Solitaire maybe).. integrated graphics cards, bottom quality HD, cheap keyboards, small monitors.. Trust me, I have to use one of these things.

  • I just bought a Dual Slot 1 motherboard and a single P3 500, I paid 397$ for my processor. Tomorrow the I lose 150 dollars because of the price drop, dammit. At least when I go to buy a second processor it will be alot cheaper.
  • The article is here: Intel Cuts Pentium Prices [yahoo.com]
  • I've been drooling over getting an Athlon system for months, and now I'm reading all sorts of articles mentioning that AMD might not be able to manufacture enough of these nuggets, or maybe there won't be enough motherboard support, etc.

    *sigh*

  • Let's thank AMD (Score:3)

    by webslacker ( 15723 ) on Sunday August 22, 1999 @10:24AM (#1731674)
    Without whose competition these prices might not have been possible. Competition is good, no?
  • The article didn't mention if the new celeron has the ability to in a dual processor configuration.
    Does anyone have infos about that ?
  • "along with support for a 100MHz system bus" Silly me, I thought the Celeron supported 100+Mhz bus for quite some time now. =)
  • AMD has two pricing segments, OEM's and retail customers. The differentiation between Athlon chips is their speed, their cache size, and cache speed. The cache runs at some division of core speed. Right now, they're releasing Athlons with 512K running at half core speed. The architecture was designed to allow for varying levels of performance with price savings for low performance units.

    The lower priced Athlons are not crippled, they're slow because they have smaller, slower cache, likely clocked to 1/3 core speed. The high end version, called the Athlon Ultra will have larger cache expected to run at 2/3 or even full speed, and shipment is expected with 1MB or more of cache.

    And yes, Yahoo! is in denial that the Athlon is faster(THINK PR :). Benchmarks on the Athlon are consistently higher than anything Intel has produced as of yet.

    One thing that Yahoo!News declined to mention is that Intel, with the new Coppermine core is not expected to be significantly more efficient per clock cycle than the current PIII cores. The .18u process will allow for lower power, higher clockable units.

    I must congratulate AMD on a job well done. I'm not an AMD evangelist, just a gamer who demands the highest level of performance.
  • AMD has had problems in the past, but let's give them a chance. Too many people believing such articles too soon can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies if it leads to customers and board manufacturers going elsewhere.

    The articles may not be intended as FUD, but that's the effect all the same. We and the media should focus on the positive regarding the Athlon for a while.

  • > Given what this sort of price cutting does to spur PC sales, it's probably in software companies' interest to throw money at AMD to prop them up for a few more years just to keep the pressure on Intel.

    And in consumers' interest as well. If you have the choice between an AMD processor and an Intel processor with equivalent performance, and the AMD costs 10-20% more, go for the AMD. Don't do it out of AMD advocacy; think of it as a downpayment on your next processor, which you might not be able to afford at all if you don't pay a little down on it now.
  • In the last 10 weeks the best price for the K6-III-450 shown on pricewatch [pricewatch.com] has dropped from $218US to $146US. I think this is mostly a natural result of its sliding down the curve from "latest thing" to "next latest thing" to "recently latest thing", and it will undoubtedly get another downslope shove when the K7s hit the street.

  • Is broke..

    And i wonder how low they'll go?
  • intel holds a de-facto standard for INTELS. from what I've read, I believe the EV-6 bus is supposed to scale better, and offer better performance for multi-processored machines.
  • From what I understand, putting the L2 cache on-die creates a huge quality control mess. If the processor core is perfect, but the L2 cache isn't right, you throw out the processor. This makes prices high because us consumers have to pay for one we bought plus a prorated portion of all the ones they threw away. That's why LCD prices are high and don't drop quickly, because they're very hard to make perfectly. It's been a long time, and my memory isn't great, but didn't the Pentium Pro have an on-die cache? Those tanked pretty hard. Sure, it would be great if we had a CPU, 2 megs of L2 cache, and 128 megs of RAM on one piece of silicon (which is entirely possible with current technology and has been proposed by more than one person) but the price just does not make it realistic.
    -Barry

    I'm no engineer. If I'm entirely wrong, please don't flame me, it will make me cry.

  • The summary is incorrect. Pentium IIIs will be out at 600MHz, not Celerons. Celerons should be out at 550MHz before the end of the year:
    "But Pentium III on Coppermine won't stand still, coming in at 600MHz and faster. Celeron will remain about one clock speed grade behind it, sources said."
    Shadowspawn
  • intel does it why can't you???

    oh yeah it's not "stock" and you can blow up your chip just like if you mess up the rez setting with a modern moniter when you are setting up you can blow it up. =)

  • Where can i buy these old crappy used computers???
  • Sounds like our old friend Elmer FUD from Marketing. All the reports I've seen say that Athlon is a direct competitor for the high-end PIII -- with generally better performance and no Big Brother Inside serial number.
    /.
  • Whats the big deal? Intel, or all other chip makers for that matter, cut prices all the time! If this wasn't so we'd still be paying top price for an i8088.

    People can say that this price drop was all because of the Athlon; maybe, but if their prices didn't drop continously then no-one would buy Intel's new chips.

    Next time, how about an article that says the sun set in Minnesota?
  • Yahoo - Document Not Found
    The document you requested is not found.

    You can search for it, or go to the top of Yahoo.

    If you still have problems, please send us mail.


    ------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------

    Copyright © 1994-99 Yahoo! All Rights Reserved.
  • The Conspiracy Theroy. Gee, that's original. Maybe AMD has been undercutting Intel all these years so it could drive Intel out of business. Yea, that could be it. So are you also saying that Intel should have kept it's higher prices, and lose customers? That's bad business, and since Intel is a business, and wishes to stay in business, of course it's going to cut prices. Airlines do it all the time, one goes down in fares, all the other ones follow suit. But you don't hear acusations that Southwest is driving the other airlines out of business. And I too hope AMD isn't driven out of the market, because like the original poster said, competition is good.
  • with Athelon or whatever the new AMD's are called now coming out this was very expected
  • It's because they are planning on the price cut. It's a quick gimmick to hold your money in their hands, ie, Give us your money now and when we get the new Celerons (which haven't really started shipping yet) in at $180, then we'll send it to you. The problem is that when they do get in, all the halfway honest people selling them out there will be selling them also, and probably for less.

    If it sounds to good to be true, then it probably is.
  • Right, but I think the new processor(amd register aleron.com:)) will have the same performance of K7 and we wil see K7 whih more cache and more MHZ.
  • damn it! I just bought a 466 mhz celeron for like twice the price of a 600 mhz now! damn you intel!!
  • Its a pity I dont like PC's


  • I have a very hard time seeing Intel taking a beating from the BP6 motherboard, or anything else Abit makes. Yes it's interesting to run a dual celeron system, but serious firms with large budgets and stability in mind tend to go the pentium 2/3 way. Also remember that every celeron cpu that's purchased takes away a user from AMD and puts them on Intel's bandwagon. I'd say if I was intel I'd be quite pleased with the succes of the celeron ;) which is looks like they are as new chips continue to crank out.
  • Definitley a good thing for Intel to cut their prices... they've been way to high (at least in my opinion) for way too long. I heard about this before, and thought it was only going to be a 10 - 15% cut, but upwards of 40%.. yeehaw!

    Best thing i've heard all day..
    ______________________________________
  • This is the actual relevant link to this story. Whoops :)

    http://dailynews.yahoo .com/h/zd/19990820/tc/19990820154.html [yahoo.com]
    ______________________________________
  • My bet is that even though Intel could disable SMP capabilities in the new breed of celerons, I bet they won't and here's why: Currently, only Intel processors work in SMP systems. Athlon has support for SMP, but they can't use the de-facto standard because Intel has patented it. Intel can say that celerons are not supported in an SMP system and thus no big name companies (which comprise the bulk of the market) are going to ship celerons in SMP systems.

    Meanwhile, the build-it-yourself hobbyists will have the choice of a cheap 1cpu Athlon system, an almost as cheap SMP celeron system, or an expensive SMP Athlon system. For anyone running Win2K, BeOS, Linux, or whatever that is not Win98, it is a no-brainer to pay a couple of bucks extra and get an extra 60-80% performance benefit.

    Think of SMP capable, super-overclockable, 100MHz celerons as Intel's stealth weapon against AMD in the hobbyist market.

    This is the way competition is suppossed to work, and I sure hope it does because come next year when those .18 micron celerons start to show up, is when I plan on upgrading to a new system and I want it cheap and fast.

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