What constitutes value?
You may be reading all of this and thinking to yourself, "This is crazy. He's saying that they've engineered these chips to go slow." And you would be right, but that doesn't mean this is crazy. This is business, folks, and it's all about serving the market.

One chunk of the market simply wants a processor to go into a device. Simply stated, in many cases, any Pentium clone will do—the cheaper, the better. If you're buying an AOL web terminal thingy for grandma (or a cut-rate eMachines system that will serve the same purpose), you probably don't care how fast the processor is, just so long as the price is right. The same goes for many corporate IT departments looking to buy glorified word processors for the secretarial pool. In part, value processors exist to serve these needs without sullying the Pentium or Athlon brand names.

That's not where we're coming from here at TR, though. We pay attention to the real value proposition when evaluating these things. The question is simple: does the processor offer a solid combination of price and performance? On that front, "value" processors haven't always delivered the best value. The original Celeron had no L2 cache at all, and it was a dog. It was cheap, but it wasn't a good value. Likewise, the Athlon 1.4GHz is selling for about $110 right now at online vendors, which makes it a better value than many "value" processors. Still, not everybody's made of money. What we're looking for in a value processor is decent performance at a great price. Lose either end of that balance, and we'll go looking elsewhere, thanks.

The contenders
The Duron 1.1GHz is very familiar territory, because it's just a 100MHz clock speed bump up from the Duron 1GHz. Beyond that, it's not really changed at all. It's still very suave looking with its purple core. I didn't quite capture the deep purple color in this shot, but here's how it looks:

AMD's Duron 1.1GHz

Compared to the last couple revisions of the Athlon, the Duron core is a little bit smaller, like so:

From left to right: Thunderbird, Morgan, and Palomino

You can tell by looking that it's a sawed-off Palomino, not a T-bird derivative.

The Celeron 1.1GHz is also very much like the previous top-of-the-line Celeron, the 900MHz model. That's a bit surprising, because even at over 1GHz, the Celeron still sits on a 100MHz bus. The Celeron 1.1GHz doesn't incorporate any of the enhancements made to the Pentium III "Tualatin" 1.2GHz, as one might expect. Those enhancements, including hardware prefetch logic, could help bring the Celeron up to par feature-wise with the "Morgan" Durons. Those changes will probably come to the Celeron line soon, but they're not here yet.

So, for now, the Celeron still looks like it has for a while now...

The Intel Celeron 1.1GHz

Now that we've seen the purty pictures, let's get down to performance.