What is a Celeron and why doesn't it work for Giga, etc.?

[Nick Batzdorf]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention Celerons here, and therefore just assumed they don't work for our purposes. What's missing from them - are they just underpowered, or is it more than that?

[Joseph Burrell]

Nick... I thought (personally) that their number crunching ability as well as smaller cache sizes did not lend themselves well to audio/video work. Such thing as encoding/decoding video just doesn't work as well on a Celeron so I would assume that audio production would suffer as well.

[Kanjika]

They have half the cache of a normal pentium 4, which makes them alot slower in some cases. Theyre also more prone to branch mispredicts and stuff but im gonna get wayyy to complicated so ill stop :D

Theyre underpowered, yes.

[habibbijan]

Essentially, the Celeron is just a crippled version of the Pentium 4. The front-side-bus (FSB) and amount of onboard cache are two important aspects of how "fast" a processor runs. Compare this:

----------------
Pentium 4 "Northwood": 533 or 800 MHz FSB / 512 kb L2 cache
Celeron "Northwood": 400 MHz FSB / 128 kb L2 cache

Pentium 4 "Prescott" (Socket T): 800 MHz FSB / 1 MB L2 cache
Celeron D "Prescott" (Socket 478): 533 MHz FSB / 256 kb L2 cache
----------------

As you can see, the Celeron is a mere shadow of the P4, suited mainly for general purpose / office computing and not multimedia-intensive applications. The Celeron D is a large step in the right direction, but it has its rear-end handed to it by a comparable P4 or AMD Athlon 64.

Here's an article all about the Celeron D.
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2093

[Bruce A. Richardson]

Damned elitists.

[dcoscina]

I have a Celeron Dell laptop that runs EWQLSO Silver and Gigastudio 3.0 Solo with little to no hiccups. Obviously my P4 desktop gets most of the use but I have used my laptop for sketches on Sonar with no playback problems whatsoever through my Tascam US-122

[Nick Batzdorf]

Thanks everyone. 's what I thought.

[John DeBorde]

i built a cheapo machine awhile back with a celeron and SIS chipset that i could never get to work right with giga 2.54. there were these weird jumpy ghost notes whenever the voice count got high.

i could never figure out what the problem was, but i always suspected the sis chipset or the celeron. i got sick of troubleshooting it and just replaced the mobo & processor with a P4 and an intel mobo-no more problems!

hmmph.

john

[habibbijan]

Without trying to spark a holy war, the price / performance ratio is what makes me appreciate the majority of AMD's lineup of CPUs, at least until you get to the top end. For the same price of a Celeron, you can get an AMD that will blow the doors off the Celeron and compete nicely against a P4 costing twice as much. The supporting chipsets are light years beyond what they were a few years ago, and the Athlon 64 series shows tremendous potential as well.

No need for a group buy after all. :)

[Alewis]

Just as a point of comparison on this, as a backup GS machine I have a 600 MHz PIII Celeron with 256 MB Ram. It is running WinME in WDM compatibility mode, using the built-in Crystal soundcard and joystick MIDI port (which is not possible in XP), and with Giga 2.2 it works just fine for whatever I can get to load on there. I don't use the NFX, I just use it for playback and to resolve any production bottlenecks. Fortunately I don't do the full-bore orchestral thing (yet) so I don't face the more pressing performance needs of the power users around here.

Still, that's the great thing about Giga -- it uses whatever resources are there, and with what I feel is very solid performance. My point being that a Celeron can work as long as it's not overworked.

That's why I really love how second and even third generation PCs can be repurposed as GS2 machines. And even older ones can be Gigasampler machines. :D