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@ 2004/07/02When I look at Semprons, I keep thinking about 1998 and the original Celerons.
For those of you not around at the time, Intel created the Celeron line as a hurried response to AMD's K6-2 line.
The first Celerons (called "Covingtons") came out in March 1998, and were essentially PIIs with no L2 cache.
Run at default speeds, the Covingtons were, to put it mildly, dogs. However, they were cheap, very overclockable (by the standards of the time), had a much better floating point unit than the K6-2, and didn't miss the lack of an L2 cache all that much in games. So many people bought them, even though people knew that Intel was going to follow up with a Celeron with cache late that summer.
In late August, Intel came out with the Mendocino Celeron, and the onboard cache brought it quite close (about 5%) to PIIs in performance, and then the overclocking really started. People were buying Celerons for $100 or less, overclocking them, and getting results comparable to PIIs costing hundreds and hundreds more.
This socket 754 Sempron reminds me of those days and those first Celerons.
The question is: Is it more like a Covington, or a Mendocino?
For those of you not around at the time, Intel created the Celeron line as a hurried response to AMD's K6-2 line.
The first Celerons (called "Covingtons") came out in March 1998, and were essentially PIIs with no L2 cache.
Run at default speeds, the Covingtons were, to put it mildly, dogs. However, they were cheap, very overclockable (by the standards of the time), had a much better floating point unit than the K6-2, and didn't miss the lack of an L2 cache all that much in games. So many people bought them, even though people knew that Intel was going to follow up with a Celeron with cache late that summer.
In late August, Intel came out with the Mendocino Celeron, and the onboard cache brought it quite close (about 5%) to PIIs in performance, and then the overclocking really started. People were buying Celerons for $100 or less, overclocking them, and getting results comparable to PIIs costing hundreds and hundreds more.
This socket 754 Sempron reminds me of those days and those first Celerons.
The question is: Is it more like a Covington, or a Mendocino?
