New Celeron, price cuts from Intel

Chip giant Intel Corp. today released a faster version of its Celeron microprocessor, aimed at the low-cost PC marketplace, and announced price cuts on its other desktop microprocessors.

The new 300MHz Celeron chip, available now, is priced at $159 each in 1,000-unit quantities, while pricing for the 266MHz Celeron chip, which debuted in April, has been lowered from $155 to $106 in 1,000-unit quantities, a 32 percent decrease, said Carl Larson, product marketing manager at Intel in Santa Clara, Calif.

The company originally targeted a second-half 1998 release for the 300MHz Celeron chip, and the early release could allow Intel to release technology based on its 3D, audio and video processing instruction set, code-named Katmai, in the first quarter of 1999 instead of the second quarter as had been expected, he said.

The Celeron chips, designed for computers selling at $1,200 or less, will eventually replace Intel's multimedia-enabled MMX Pentium chip family, Larson said. The newest chip speeds performance by between 11 and 35 percent over the 266MHz and the highest-performing MMX-enabled Pentium chips, he added.

Later this year, Intel is set to release a Celeron chip with an L2 memory cache, which will speed performance even more, company officials said.

OEMs introducing new products based upon the 300MHz Celeron chip include Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Packard Bell NEC, Sony Corp., and Acer, Larson said.

Price cuts on the Pentium and Pentium II microprocessor lines are as follows:

Price cuts Pentium II Processor April '98 Price June '98 Price % Decrease 400 MHz with 512K cache $824 $722 12% 350 MHz with 512K cache $621 $519 16% 333 MHz with 512K cache $492 $412 16% 300 MHz with 512K cache $375 $305 19% 266 MHz with 512K cache $246 $198 20% 233 MHz with 512K cache $198 $161 19% Pentium Processor Desktop April '98 Price June '98 Price % Decrease 233 MHz with MMX Technology $134 $106 21% 200 MHz with MMX Technology $95 $95 -- 166 MHz with MMX Technology $95 $95 --