Celeron? What the heck is a "Celeron"?

It's been a while, and we've had a chance to get used to it, but we allgroaned collectively when Intel announced that it had settled on the name"Pentium" for its P5/586 microprocessor. Well, get ready to start groaningagain, because the people who brought you that wonderful little moniker areat it again: the low-cost version of the Pentium II that will be sold insub-$1000 will be marketed under the name "Celeron".

Yes, Celeron.

It's a vegetable; it's a desert topping. It's a vegetable and a deserttopping!

Ok, not really.

"This is a very logical step in the evolution of our Intel Inside brandingstrategy," said Dennis Carter, VP of Intel Corporate Marketing. "The purpose of having separate brands is to give users the ability to quickly and easily identify the computer with the processor that best suits theirneeds, from [performance] PCs down to [basic] PCs."

The Celeron processor will be part of a series of announcements from thecompany due for April, that will include faster Pentium IIs for high-endPCs and workstations, as well as 233 and 266 MHz mobile Pentium II CPUs.Unfortunately, no one is really excited about Celeron since it is essentially a Pentium II with the L2 cache ripped out. The performance ofa 266 MHz Celeron system will likely not exceed that of a 200 MHz Pentiumsystem, but Intel would like companies to move away from that chipset