Celeron 335D, the disguised Willamette

Introduction
Celerons form the basis of Intel's entry-level platform which includes integrated/value motherboards as well. The Celeron 335D is the fastest - until the Celeron 340D - 2.93GHz - becomes mainstream - of the newer bunch of Celerons which are set to rule the Intel world. Launched back in June this year.

One thing first to set the record straight. Some have viewed Celerons since their launch as a bad investment. This is not necessarily true. I was a Celeron user and managed to overclock the CPU - which was a Celeron 300a to 450MHz by changing jumpers to 100MHz on my PC Chips M748LMRT dual socket board. As Vince Freeman from Sharkyextreme puts it, "The Intel Celeron Processors have been permanently etched into our memories as legends of the overclocking world". And many geeks still carry fond memories of Abit's BP6 motherboard which was the first true mainstream dual processor.

It used a VIA 694x and was so popular a website was dedicated wholly to that product and it still continue to exist as of today. Hence the Celeron, through overclocking, allowed many to get hold of performance at affordable prices. Obviously, if Intel held all the cards, we would still be running a 400MHz processor and the Celeron would not even exist. That particular product does not operate in a vacuum. The competition in this case, AMD, gives a very hard time to the Celeron line which owes its survival mainly to the allegiance of Tier-1 companies like HP or Dell. You just have to flick through the pages of any popular computer magazines to guess where the smaller retailers do their shopping.

In detail
The Celeron 335D resembles more the Pentium IV Willamette than any processor except that it is etched on 90nm strained silicon process. The P4 Willamette - the s478 version at least - and the celeron featured 16K L1 and 256K L2 cache. Moreover, it gets some welcomed improvements from the Prescott core with 31 pipeline stages as well as enhanced branch predictor, scheduler and execution core but still no hyperthreading. Also in the bag, 13 new SSE3 instructions and a welcomed boost to the FSB from 400Mhz to 533MHz. All this to say that that particular Celeron would be a perfect upgrade if you have an older Pentium IV 2Ghz, looking to be boosted. All these helped to improve Performance markedly as compared to the older generation Celeron. But while they perform well as compared to the products they replace, there can only be some sense of belatedness when you see that similar priced AMD products were offering this kind of performance since a very long time indeed.

In the Market
A quick look at pricewatch, for example, reveals a painful truth. The Celeron 325, 330 and 335 - 2.53GHz, 2.66Ghz and 2.8GHz respectively - have to face the Athlon XP2800+, the Athlon XP 3000+ and the Athlon XP3200+ which fall into their price range. Not what you would call easy competition. To add insult to injury, quality AMD motherboards are generally cheaper than their Intel counterparts. In UK, the situation is slightly similar. The 325, 330 and 335 cost the same as an AMD XP 2600+, XP 2700+ and XP 2800+, not as dramatic as in the US but still, facing the same tough guys that took on your elder brother is no easy task.

Overclocking and General Performance
But all is not lost - the Celeron 335D is a nifty overclocker in pure terms. Since it is effectively a mini Prescott, there should in theory not be that much difficult to overclock it. Sharky Extreme brought the Celeron to 3.55GHz with a 169MHz FSB and 1.45v core voltage. Good but probably not enough. This is the same result that Xbitlabs got, leading them to conclude that the C0 core stepping limit should be around there. Hardware.fr was able to push the Celeron D even further at 3.7GHz, showing a gain of 33%, far from the Celeron 300Mhz 50% guaranteed success but still. With that kind of speed, The Celeron D 335 should give some headache to the P4 2.8E, which costs more than twice the price.

The future
The Celeron D 335 is still using the old but mature socket 478 platform which includes proven chipsets as Intel's own 84x and 865 families, SIS 6xx and VIA's P4XX branches. A migration to LGA775 is expected early next year together with a boost in speed - up to 3.2GHz - and perhaps in FSB as well as a couple of other innovations : XD Bit, Thermal Monitoring, PCI Express and probably SATA. The so called Celeron 340 or Celeron D "J" is just starting to appear on the market. So new it is that you won't find it on its own in the US. I've only managed to spot it in France.

If AMD's task of separating the budget range from the performance range is easy - the older range is basically the Athlon XP rebadged and is not 64-bit enabled, the same exercise is more perilous for Intel which must manage both the Pentium 4 golden hen and its nimble but pugnacious competitor, AMD. This has been made more difficult by what I personally consider to be a nonsense, the Intel number naming, which hides the fact that similarly clocked processors would perform very differently from each other. The delicate equilibrium is that the Celeron must be slow enough so as not to impact the P4 range while at the same time being quick enough so as to stay in the wake of the Athlon XP/Duron/Sempron. A very difficult task indeed. All is not lost however, if you look forward to a dirt cheap overclocker. Oh and do not forget that someone may eventually try to redo the BP6 trick again, something like the Asus PC-DL.

PS: I found it quite surprising that some large hardware websites - I mean really large ones - did not even bother with a Celeron D review. Some of them preferred, for example, bundling the Celeron D with another newcomer, the Athlon Sempron, with some predictable results - the trouncing of the former. Otherwise, reviews for the Celeron D family are as rare as fingers on one hand.

L'INQS
Intel's Celeron page
Xbitlabs Celeron review
Sharky Extreme Celeron Review
Hardware.fr Celeron Review
Anand;s Celeron Review