A good fit for the value market
How many mainstream value customers know what L2 cache is or how it affects system performance? Mention cache, and Joe Sixpack is liable to explain that he'll be paying for the system with his credit card, not with a wad of bills. While more technically proficient audiences will notice the new Celeron's specs are a little lacking, that fact will be lost on the majority of customers Intel is targeting with the chip. How convenient. What mainstream consumers will notice is that 1.7GHz clock speed, which they will inevitably equate to better performance than any processor with a lower clock speed value. There are some sales people out there who know what they're talking about when it comes to IPC, but in my experience they're pretty rare, especially in places like Costco or Wal-Mart where many Celerons find a home.

To be fair, mainstream users do have a lot to gain from the Celeron 1.7GHz's Socket 478 compatibility, even with the reduced L2 cache. Older Tualatin-based Celerons are limited to the Socket 370 platform. There is no shortage of motherboards available for that platform, but new innovation and energy are no longer focused on Socket 370. Since the Celeron 1.7GHz is essentially a Pentium 4 processor, it's compatible with the latest and greatest Socket 478-based Pentium 4 motherboards on the market—boards which feature USB 2.0, Firewire, decent onboard sound, and ATA/133. In the end, Joe Sixpack might actually get more value out of integrated Firewire or USB 2.0 ports than he ever would have realized with a little more L2 cache.

I'm not convinced that the Celeron 1.7GHz's support for SSE2 is going to have a huge impact on the mainstream value market. Its usefulness, as even a selling point, may be lost on most consumers. Still, some applications stand to gain a lot from SSE2 if it's used effectively, and that's something that can certainly help improve a low IPC.

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, with their results averaged, using the following test systems.

Duron 1.3GHz Pentium 4 1.7A Celeron 1.7GHz
Motherboard Abit KR7A-RAID Abit BD7II-RAID
Front-side bus 200MHz (2x133Mhz) 533MHz (4x133MHz)
Chipset VIA KT266A Intel 845E
North bridge VT8366A Intel 82845E (MCH)
South bridge VT8233 Intel 82801DB (ICH4)
Memory size 512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type PC2100 DDR SDRAM
Graphics Visiontek GeForce4 Ti 4600
NVIDIA 29.42 Driver
Storage IBM 60GXP 40GB 7200RPM ATA/100 hard drive
Operating System Windows XP Professional

I would have loved to get some results in from my Tualatin-based Celeron 1.2GHz, but the motherboard refused to cooperate. Ditto for my Willamette core Pentium 4 1.7GHz. They both seem to have fried in storage while I was on vacation.

What we have rounded up for you is AMD's fastest Duron processor at 1.3GHz and a Northwood Pentium 4 2.26GHz running at 1.7GHz on a 100MHz front side bus. This 'Pentium 4 1.7A' is included for kicks—and to give us an idea just how important the Northwood core's extra L2 cache is.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All the 3D gaming tests used the high detail image quality settings at a resolution of 1024x768 in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.