Benchmark results
The Celeron 1.7GHz's smaller L2 cache leaves less room for the processor to queue things up, making memory bandwidth even more important for than it was with Willamette Pentium 4s.

Memory performance

Intel's quad-pumped 400MHz front side bus complements DDR SDRAM nicely and gives the Celeron 1.7GHz quite a bit more effective memory bandwidth than the Duron 1.3GHz, which is also running DDR SDRAM. Since both the Celeron 1.7GHz and Pentium 4 1.7A are running on the same chipset, you don't see any real difference in the memory bandwidth available to each.

Let's take a look at things from a slightly different angle with a much different Linpack graph.

Linpack quite clearly illustrates the benefits of more L2 cache. Our Pentium 4 1.7GHz crunches through larger matrix sizes much faster than the Celeron 1.7GHz. The Duron peaks higher than the Celeron 1.7GHz early on, but the Duron's small 64KB L2 cache causes performance to tank even earlier than the Celeron 1.7GHz.

As matrix sizes extend beyond the capacities of the processors' L2 caches, performance becomes limited by the main memory bandwidth available to each.

Business Winstone

The Celeron 1.7GHz is at the back of the pack for Business Winstone, falling well behind the lower-clocked Duron 1.3GHz. A strong showing by our Pentium 4 1.7A indicates that extra L2 cache definitely helps out in Business Winstone. Since this testing suite uses what I'd classify as the most commonly used applications for the mainstream value market, Intel would be well advised to get on that L2 cache size increase for the next line of Celeron processors.

Content Creation Winstone

In last year's Content Creation Winstone the Celeron 1.7GHz falls behind the competition again, and it's still behind the Duron 1.3GHz by a solid margin. A larger cache again proves beneficial for the Pentium 4 architecture again as the Pentium 4 1.7A flourishes.

The multimedia applications in this year's updated Content Creation Winstone seem to favor the Pentium 4 platform as a whole, but the Celeron 1.7GHz is still hampered by its castrated L2 cache. At least it's able to beat the Duron 1.3GHz here.