CELERON CPUs

In an attempt to better address the low-cost PC sector - hitherto the province of the cloners, AMD and Cyrix, who were continuing to develop the legacy Socket 7 architecture - Intel launched its Celeron range of processors in April 1998.

Intel's existing low-end product - the venerable Pentium MMX - was no longer performance competitive. Moreover, its industry standard Socket 7 platform hosted a market of competitor processors which could be drop-in replacements for the Intel CPU. Intel therefore decided to forego the low risk strategy of producing a faster Pentium MMX and opt instead for developing a budget part that was pin-compatible with their high-end Pentium II product, using the Pentium II's Slot 1 interface.

Based around the same P6 microarchitecture as the Pentium II, and using the same 0.25-micron fab process, the original Celerons offered a complete package of the latest technologies, including support for AGP graphics, ATA-33 hard disk drives, SDRAM and ACPI. They worked with any Intel Pentium II chipset that supported a 66MHz system bus - including the 440LX, 440BX and the new 440EX - the latter being specifically designed for the "Basic PC" market.