Intel revs up Celeron chip

Intel yesterday released a 433MHz version of its Celeron processor - the version of the Pentium II aimed at the budget PC market.

Celeron chips with clock speeds of 400MHz, 366MHz and 333MHz remain available, while the 300MHz model - which drew criticism last year for showing worse bench-mark results than some older Pentium processors with MMX technology - is being phased out.

The latest Celeron upgrades highlight the war being waged at the low-end between Intel, AMD and Cyrix - a subsidiary of National Semiconductor.

The latest figures from research firm Romtec show Cyrix-based budget PCs out-sold Intel machines in the UK during the fourth quarter of last year. Other research from PC Data for January revealed that for the first time, AMD globally sold more chips for PCs than Intel. It repeated the result in February.

The Celeron release follows Intel's launch of the Pentium III Xeon processor last Wednesday in 500MHz and 550MHz versions.

Up to eight of the high-end processors - which can each come with up to 2MB of cache memory - will be used in powerful servers and workstations at the same time. Previously, only four Pentium II Xeon chips could be used in a single server.