Are celeron chips rubbish?

steppen

I was in a computer shop recently, where i overheard a salesperson telling a customer to avoid buying a laptop with a celeron chip and to instead opt for a centrino or some other such processor. Being the owner of a Sony Vaio with a celeron chip, I'm just wondering about your views on this subject

Nukem

Funny that a salesperson tells the customer the cheaper chip is rubbish and the way more expensive one is better:p

Celerons are ok but they are not the best for some applications. But i think they are grand as long as you dont want them for anything intense.

nukem

kasintahan

If you're not gaming or doing heavy graphic (especially 3D) or high res video work then you won't notice the difference.

astec123

The laptop I have has everything the same as my mates except processor, his one crashes about once every 6 hrs mine never does and if anything happens, mine recovers after about 30seconds, his just totally conks out. Avoud celerons like the plague, Centrino, P4 or an AMD chip all the way.

Stark

Centrino's (with Pentium M chip) are the best - high performance, great battery life/heat usage etc.
Centrino M is a Centrino system with a Celeron processor, not as good performance
Mobile Pentium 4 (Pentium 4 M) systems have high performance but don't have the great battery life (they're for desktop replacement systems)
Mobile Celeron - none of the above.

Yes, it is confusing

Things are just as complicated in AMD territory.

mukki

astec123 wrote:

The laptop I have has everything the same as my mates except processor, his one crashes about once every 6 hrs mine never does and if anything happens, mine recovers after about 30seconds, his just totally conks out. Avoud celerons like the plague, Centrino, P4 or an AMD chip all the way.

that was a software problem or machine fault
there is no reilability difference, its only affects the speed in certain apps, i had a celeron laptop run 24X7 regularily encoded divX into dvds took about 8 hrs and it just worked, all day every day

zap

i would never use a celeron the difference is very noticeable

kasintahan

zap wrote:

i would never use a celeron the difference is very noticeable

Celeron wouldn't be my chip of choice but for an office machine you'd never be able to tell the difference.

Remember it's only cache memory that seperates Celeron from standard P4.
If your application rarely hit the cache then theres 0 difference.

astec123

Celeron wouldn't be my chip of choice but for an office machine you'd never be able to tell the difference.

Remember it's only cache memory that seperates Celeron from standard P4.
If your application rarely hit the cache then theres 0 difference.

Also the chips size, in nm. Thats another difference.

that was a software problem or machine fault
there is no reilability difference, its only affects the speed in certain apps, i had a celeron laptop run 24X7 regularily encoded divX into dvds took about 8 hrs and it just worked, all day every day

Wrong, the celeron was doing the same tasks but struggled to keep up with the data it had to process, no amount of tlc and hardware swaping helped it, the image processing was dismal to say the least, find me a press publication for computers, mainstream (not a bally go backwards one) that puts any celeron in their laptop charts.

Nukem

Could get nitty gritty (taken straight from the intel site)

Intel® Pentium® M Processor

Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor supporting Hyper-Threading
Technology†
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor-M
Intel® Celeron® M Processor
Mobile Intel® Celeron® Processor

Nukem

Tom Dunne

astec123 wrote:

Also the chips size, in nm. Thats another difference.

You are talking through your serial port - both Celeron and Pentium chips are manufactured on the same process. Pentiums have extra features, such as cache, that make a hell of a difference to performance.

nm, or nano-meters is a measure of the wavelength of light used to expose the light-sensitive material that creates the features on the chip. Both Celerons and Pentium 4s are manufactured on th 90nm manufacturing process. To say the chips size is in nm is displaying a fundamental lack of knowledge about the structure of microprocessors, or PCs/laptops in general.

astec123 wrote:

Wrong, the celeron was doing the same tasks but struggled to keep up with the data it had to process, no amount of tlc and hardware swaping helped it,

That is down again down to the chip. Celerons are never going to be able to process data in the same manner as Pentium 4s. That's the way they were designed, that's why they are cheaper.

astec123 wrote:

find me a press publication for computers, mainstream (not a bally go backwards one) that puts any celeron in their laptop charts.

If there were "charts" for budget laptops (at the bottom of the scale), I would not be surprised to find Celerons there.

mukki

astec123 wrote:

Wrong, the celeron was doing the same tasks but struggled to keep up with the data it had to process, no amount of tlc and hardware swaping helped it, the image processing was dismal to say the least, find me a press publication for computers, mainstream (not a bally go backwards one) that puts any celeron in their laptop charts.

what do you mean by "keep up", everyone agrees that they can be slower, but you were saying that a celeron pc needed to be rebooted ever 6 hrs

pwd

Celerons are good budget chips.
The Pentium 4 is maybe better value if you want to spend extra.
AMD is not such good value but probably the best performance.
I run XP Pro on a Celeron 2.2 ghz system
It was noticeably slow until I upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 768MB.
Now I am very happy with it and I use some reasonably memory intensive software like Flash MX 2004.
In my opinion, unless you are using very memory-intensive software, or price isn't a significant factor, you would be better off getting a Celeron and lots of RAM than a higher-spec chip.

astec123

You are talking through your serial port - both Celeron and Pentium chips are manufactured on the same process. Pentiums have extra features, such as cache, that make a hell of a difference to performance.

Sorry talking on 2 boards at the same time and talking about centrinos on one and celerons on the other.

As for the size, Im am totally nackered and the word would not come to me so I posted the best answer I could at the time to explain the point, still I am wrong as I am refering as above.

If there were "charts" for budget laptops (at the bottom of the scale), I would not be surprised to find Celerons there.

take a look at PCadvisor it has a budget chart let me see this one, nearest me all .... centrinos oh my! and look an amd there too.

what do you mean by "keep up", everyone agrees that they can be slower, but you were saying that a celeron pc needed to be rebooted ever 6 hrs

Simple photo editing to video processing, some word processing and then a bit of internet use, it struggled in all to compete.

Tom Dunne

astec123 wrote:

take a look at PCadvisor it has a budget chart let me see this one, nearest me all .... centrinos oh my! and look an amd there too.

I wouldn't call £750+ sterling budget laptops (that's €1000ish).

rainbow kirby

Now that we're talking about budget chips, how do AMD Sempron chips rate?

ozt9vdujny3srf

Good, they're essentially athlon XP chips.

rainbow kirby

Interesting, because I found a laptop I might be interested in, for under 700 euro delivered, and it has a Sempron CPU.

Zascar

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question268.htm
http://www.cpuscorecard.com/cpufaqs/sep99c.htm
http://www7.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020903/

TerrorFirmer

Bascially, if you want if for work, business or something of a similar nature, Celerons are grand. If you are using heavy duty multimedia applications and games, Pentium would be a good idea

steppen

Is there some piece of hardware one can buy to increase the cache size of a celeron chip?

lomb

steppen wrote:

Is there some piece of hardware one can buy to increase the cache size of a celeron chip?

yes, its called a pentium........

Tom Dunne

steppen wrote:

Is there some piece of hardware one can buy to increase the cache size of a celeron chip?

No, the cache is an internal structure on the chip itself.

In the good old days, cache used to be external and I believe it was an option on earlier 386's and 486's (as all the young fella's ask "What are they?" ).

Thomas

ah ****e i remember my brother having a 386 and a 486, guess im just over the hill

dawballz

If I can recall my lecturtes correctly the way a chip is made is that the silicon wafer is broken up into loads of tiny pieces which is the actual chip. The pieces are tested and the fastest/best performing ones are the centrinos/pentiums and the ones that don't pass the test for centrino/pent. are the celerons.

Tom Dunne

That used to be the way it was. They used to build 486's (here we go again) and a portion of them would have the maths co-processor disabled to be sold as an 486 SX (and therefore cheaper). However, I believe the Celeron/Pentium/Centrino are physically different, so that is not really applicable any more.

This can be confirmed by the fact that you can have a 2.8Ghz Pentium and a 2.8Ghz Celeron - they both run at the same speed, but obviously the Pentium is more powerful. This is down to the cache, the pipelines within the chip and other wonderous things I can't think of right now.

duridian

Thomas wrote:

ah ****e i remember my brother having a 386 and a 486, guess im just over the hill

You think you are over the hill? I'm still trying to figure out where the "C=" key on my keyboard has gone

po0k

Celerons suck if you want to do anything aside from browsing and light office work.

FranknFurter

duridian wrote:

You think you are over the hill? I'm still trying to figure out where the "C=" key on my keyboard has gone

You an me both lol

An damnit, where did I put that cassette?

Tom Dunne

FranknFurter wrote:

An damnit, where did I put that cassette?

It's over beside the five and a quarter inch disk.