Intel's got a little PR mess to clean up this morning after PC World reported that its new chip, Celeron, is not as fast running applications as its competitors' clones.
Celeron, aimed at the sub-$1,000 PC market, is expected to be launched on April 15, but PC World said it obtained a pre-production PC with a Celeron chip running at a speed of 266 megahertz.
Bill Snyder, senior news editor at PC World, said that while the chip runs at its expected speed of 266 megahertz, its performance running software applications is slower than the performance of rival chips developed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Cyrix Corp.
"The thing is pretty slow," Snyder said. "There is no doubt in my mind that ... why it's slow is because of the lack of secondary cache. Take away the secondary cache and you get a big hit to performance."
Intel has said that in order to keep costs low, Celeron will have no L2, or level two, cache, which is a reserved section of the chip for storing memory.
PC World tested the chip running applications such as Excel, Microsoft Word, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPro, and a few other business applications.
Said Intel spokesman Howard High: "We don't know what the magazine has in terms of a test system. Historically, if you look back at other chips like Klamath and others, a number of publications [test] pre-production products and when the real product comes out, they wind up having to recant and reposition their words."
PC World notes in its May issue that the chip was close to the final version, but that sources close to Intel said the final version of the chip may offer slightly better performance. "Nevertheless, PC vendors privately express little enthusiasm over the new chip's performance," PC World said.
