Intel has extended its low-cost-chip strategy to its Pentium M product family, launching three new Celeron chips for budget notebooks.
The new Intel Celeron M chips complement the Pentium M processor, and are designed for thin, light notebooks. Like Intel's desktop Celeron processors, the Celeron M processors come with half as much cache as their higher-performance counterparts and run at slower clock speeds, an Intel spokesperson says.
Intel actually released the ultra-low-voltage version of the Celeron M processor in December to Motion Computing, which uses the chip in its M1300 Tablet PC. That chip runs at 800 MHz. Intel is releasing two other standard-voltage chips that will run at 1.3 GHz and 1.2 GHz. The chips come with 512K of Level 2 cache--half the Pentium M's 1MB of cache.
Budget Mobile Chips
Intel's plan for the Celeron brand is to offer processors that contain the bulk of Intel's latest chip technologies, but at slower clock speeds and lower performance than the premium product line.
The new Celeron M chips contain the same architectural features built into the Pentium M to decrease power consumption and lengthen battery life. However, by disabling half the cache of the Pentium M, Intel can charge less for the chip and move the technology into cheaper notebooks.
Advanced Micro Devices recently did the same thing with its high-end Athlon 64 chip, releasing a lower-performing version of the flagship processor, with half the cache of its predecessor.
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