Celeron Cranked Up

The processor giant Intel returned fire at AMD today, unveiling revved-up versions of its Celeron value CPUs. The new chips are intended to step up the performance potential of PCs priced at less than US$1000. The new Celerons will be manufactured using a .18 micron process, as were the 566 and 600MHz models that debuted the new Celeron design at the end of March. This generation of Celerons also includes 128KB of on-chip cache and full support for the Pentium III's SSE multimedia enhancing instructions.

The 700, 667, and 633MHz chips will be priced competitively with the Duron at $192, $170, and $138, respectively.

In other chip news, AMD introduced a new line of mobile chips today at PCExpo that feature the company's PowerNow! technology, which is aimed at reducing battery usage when running less processor-intensive applications.