Celeron D goes 64bit

Intel unveiled a new range of budget 64bit Celeron D processors last month as rival AMD launched a new Athlon64 FX-57 chip aimed at gamers.

The Mesh FX-57-based system shows the chip to be a good choice for single-core gaming though its performance in office application is less compelling.

Intel’s new chips come with a confusion of names. The ‘D’ on Pentium D processors stands for dual-core; but Celeron D chips are single core, so the ‘D’ can be taken to stand for ‘don’t know’ on the grounds that no-one understands the naming system, including Intel.

To provide some clarification, the chart above shows all the 300 series Celeron D-chips. New 64bit products are the 351, 346, 341, 336, 331 and the 326; the non-64bit 350 is also new.

The entire series has a Prescott core, a 533MHz frontside bus, and 256KB of cache; and none of the mPGA products supports 64bit addressing or ‘execute disable’, which provides hardware protection from rogue code trying to exploit buffer overruns.

The new chips are all made using 90nm process technology; and, with bulk prices ranging from about £40 to £70, they should enable the production of powerful desktop PCs at budget prices.