1Ghz Pentium Vs. 1Ghz Celeron
Intel's line of Celeron Central Processing Units (CPUs) were popular for many years as a low-cost alternative to the Pentium. The Celerons also competed with Intel's main competitor AMD, which generally offered more aggressive pricing. However, the Celeron chips made certain concessions to lower their cost, and the 1GHz version is different from the 1Ghz Pentium in several key ways.
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Form Factors and Microns
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The 1Ghz Pentium CPU is actually a Pentium III (aka P3). Like the 1Ghz Celeron, it's compatible with the Socket 370 form factor, which determines if a CPU will physically fit into a motherboard's CPU slot. Although the Celeron has fewer transistors, it's also an 18-micron CPU. Microns are a measure of the track width. Think of the tracks as blood vessels. The smaller the blood vessel, the more vessels that can be fit into the same amount of space. But instead of moving blood cells around, the tracks move bits of data. The more closely packed the tracks are, the more transistors a manufacturer can fit onto a CPU. More transistors give room for faster speeds and more complex architecture.
Bus Speeds
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The CPU's bus transfers data to and from other information hubs in the computer, like the AGP or PCI controller that manages your video card, the memory controller, and the SATA or IDE controller that manages your storage devices. Most 1Ghz Celerons have a 100MHz bus, but most 1Ghz P3s have a 133MHz bus. That may not seem like much, but the P3's bus is about 25 percent faster.
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CPU Caches
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The Level 2 cache (L2) is a bit of storage space on the CPU itself. Because this cache is located so closely, the CPU is able to store and retrieve data from it faster than anywhere else in the computer. Most 1GHz P3s had a 256 kilobyte (KB) cache, while most Celerons had only a 128KB cache. A cache twice the size made this P3 much speedier in the long run.
Laptops
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The 1Ghz Celerons were never really designed to operate in mobile devices. But Intel came out with a Pentium 3 "M," which had a 13-micron track width. While producing as much heat, they also required less voltage and less power from the battery than a standard P3 or Celeron would. Intel eventually developed Celerons for mobile devices, but these would always lag a little bit behind the Pentium M and would eventually be phased out in favor of Intel's Centrino.
Cut from the Same Cloth
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The Celeron 1Ghz and the P3 1Ghz are both based on the Tulatin core, so the differences are not all that great. These chips were produced on the same "wafers" at the fabrication plant, and the ones that did not pass quality assurance when their buses were tested at 133MHz were largely just tagged as Celerons instead of P3s, and the L2 cache cut in half.
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