Celeron v's Pentium P4

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Discussion

CVP

Original Poster:

2,799 posts

282 months

Wednesday 4th June 2003
quotequote all
All

It specific help needed here.

I am doing a financial review of the pros and cons of using Celeron processors against Pentium P4 processors in kit we lease to our customers.

On the one hand I'm told by our UK guys that there should be no problem, but on the other hand my sales colleagues in another European country tell me they can only sell a lease with a Pentium P4, not a Celeron.

I know that our product works equally well on either processor, but overall are there any major differences for other general programs out there between the two processors, or am I being given a bit of flannel from the sales guys?

I thought I'd cousult the might of the PH IT brigade as well as internal sources to help me uinderstand the overall issues.

Please bear in mind I'm not a techie so you might have to explain some things as I thought a Celeron was just a slightly cheaper and slightly slower chip but was essentially the same.

many thanks

Chris

pdV6

16,442 posts

268 months

Wednesday 4th June 2003
quotequote all
If it runs the software ok, what's the problem?

Podie

46,645 posts

282 months

Wednesday 4th June 2003
quotequote all
From what I recall, Celeron's are basically "cut down" versions of a "full" P4.

If they're going to be doing CAD/CAM or serious database work, go with a P4... but if it's general office stuff, I'd go with the Celeron.

All IMHO of course.

plotloss

67,280 posts

277 months

Wednesday 4th June 2003
quotequote all
As Podie says all a Celery is is a P4 with no/little onchip L2 cache.

Current iteration of of Celery I believe have a 256K onchip L2 cache whereas the current crop of P4's have 2mb onboard.

In real terms you arent really going to notice the difference. If the pipes in the board are good and thick and the HDD is a nice fast spinning big pipe job you shouldnt really notice the difference.

Edit: On re-reading your post I see you are no techie. Basically the only difference between the P4 and Celery brands are that the P4 can store a lot more instructions on chip before it processes them and the Celery has to keep going back to the bus to get the next load of instructions before it processes them. Think of the P4 as having a bigger fuel tank than the Celery. Apart from that though the onchip instruction set is absolutely identical.

>> Edited by plotloss on Wednesday 4th June 10:56

CVP

Original Poster:

2,799 posts

282 months

Wednesday 4th June 2003
quotequote all
Cheers guys it seems the sales bods were doing the flannel exercise - not surprised given some of their past activities.

Our product is not CAD/CAM or image manipulation so we don't need the procesing capacity of the P4.

My internal IT guys tell me we can simply substitute a Celeron with a bit of extra RAM for a P4 the standard RAM we supply and most times our customers would never know the difference in performance.

Chris