A family of lower-cost Pentium chips from Intel. The first Celerons in 1998 were Pentium II chips without an L2 cache. In 1999, models included a 128KB cache, which increased performance. As subsequent Pentium chips were introduced with larger caches, the 128KB cache was retained for Celerons. In 2004, the Celeron M was introduced, which is a Centrino version of the Pentium M. See
Celeron D,
Centrino and
Pentium M.
Greater Yields, Lower Price
Large caches use more transistors. The more transistors in a chip, the greater the chance that some of them are defective, and the chip has to be scrapped. Smaller caches result in greater yields for the chip manufacturer and therefore lower prices.