What is a Celeron?

Celeron is an marketing name for Intel's lower-cost CPU's from the Pentium family.

Intel has manufactured and sold Celeron versions of the Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Pentium-M CPU's.

Intel purposefully limits the performance of their Celeron processors to prevent them from competing with their higher-end Pentium and Xeon processors.

At the same time, the Intel Celeron processors are designed to compete against processors from AMD.

The original Celeron design was a poor performer due to the lack of L2 cache.

The next generation of the Celeron included 128KB of L2 cache which ran at the full clock speed of the CPU. This made the Celeron a strong competitor against Intel's own Pentium CPU's. The Pentium CPU's featured larger L2 caches, but they ran at only half the speed of the CPU.