Confusion all round as Celeron heads for the gulag

NEWS THAT INTEL IS CELEBRATING the launch of the 2GHx Celeron by simultaneously axing its 400MHz FSB mobos for the cheeky little chap raises a few questions. Is Chipzilla leaving low end mobos to Taiwan, and if so, does it herald the end of the line for little Celery?

Sure the new Intel mobos using the 845 chipset will run at either 533 or 400 FSB, but they're specced up for the flagchip, high margin, Pentium 4 - and priced to match - rather than for the cheap and cheerful Celeron.

Intel's mobo strategy is simple - it builds the things as an enabling technology to get new processors to market quickly. A high-up Intel suit once confided to me (a daft thing to do): "Before the ink's dried on our mobo boxes, the Taiwanese are undercutting us."

Intel has two mainstream CPU products, and that's one too many. The trick the chip giant has been trying to pull off - and not very successfully, it has to be said - since the introduction of Celeron back in the dim and distant days of the Pentium II is to maintain volume sales of the cash cow Pentium 4 rather than having people rush off and buy the much cheaper Celeron. When the first Celeron, the cacheless Covington limped onto the scene in a knee-jerk reaction to AMD eroding Intel's retail sales, there wasn't much danger of PII sales being eroded for the simple reason that Celeron was complete crap.

Intel reacted by doing two things - producing the far superior Mendocino Celeron (with outside help, it was rumoured at the time), and by throwing bucketfuls of marketing dollars at Celery's tarnished image.

But Intel got that wrong too, by keeping the Celeron marketing push going for too long, resulting in great sales for Celeron, but at the expense of the PII rather than the AMD chips it was designed to meet head on.

New mobos like the snappily-named D845GVAD2 support 400 and 533 FSB speeds and are designed for both Celeron and P4. This one features integrated graphics - something approximately 0% of Pentium 4 owners will want, so is it a Celeron board?

System builders, users and poor saps like me trying to make sense of it all are confused - and unsurprisingly so as that confusion stems from Intel's own uncertainty. Will Celeron move to 533FSB on the desktop and in mobiles, or just on the desktop? Or neither? The end result of customer uncertainty, coupled with the continuing meaningless MegaHurtz™ wars, is that they don't buy anything.

The obvious solution is to drop the Celeron line altogether, but Intel's not likely to do that, given the megabucks it's invested in the brand. Another possible (and sensible - so it won't happen) scenario would be to rebrand all the desktop chips as Pentiums and all the notebook ones as Celerons. Of course, the chip giant might be thinking of new name altogether and, as we speak, be busy trademarking every word ending in "um" and "on".

But as all experienced Intel watchers know - the only sure way of finding out what a new chip is to be called is to discover the name of Craig Barrett's horse. µ