The Celeron caches in
The 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz Celerons are quite dissimilar.

The differences between the old (right) and new (left) Celerons are more than skin deep

Peeking under the skirt of the new Celeron (left) and its predecessor (right)

In fact, the Celeron 1.2GHz is essentially a "Tualatin" Pentium III on a 100MHz bus. There are two versions of Tualatin: one with 256K of L2 cache, and one with 512KB. The new Celeron is the 256K version of Tualatin.

All previous Celerons since the 300A have had an L2 cache of 128K, so the new Celeron's 256K cache is a real boost. The 1.2GHz Celeron's cache size now compares favorably to the Duron's. (Although the Duron has only 64K of L2 cache, that cache doesn't replicate the contents of its beefy 64K L1 data cache, so the Duron's effective cache size is 128K.)

The Tualatin Celeron also steals a page from the Duron (or, more appropriately, from the Pentium 4) by incorporating hardware data prefetch logic to help keep its cache well-fed. Hardware prefetch logic has shown itself effective in helping processors take better advantage of high-performance memory types like RDRAM and DDR SDRAM. Whether prefetch will help the Celeron wring the most out of its PC100 SDRAM, we can't say.

Unlike AMD, Intel is well into its 0.13 micron production, and the Celeron 1.2GHz is built on that more advanced manufacturing process, which uses copper interconnects. The 0.13-micron process helps the chip run cooler and cuts power consumption, too. The Celeron barely sips power, pulling in only 1.475 volts at 1.2GHz . Despite these frosty attributes, the Celeron's core is adorned with Intel's heat spreader. The heat spreader is supposed to improve thermal transfer between the processor and heat sink, but I find the fact it protects the CPU core from clumsy heat sink installation attempts far more valuable.