Re: junk like the Celeron
> IIRC each chip was roughly half the price of the Pentium it was based upon, and benchmarked at 90% of the speed.
I did watch with admiration at the time the motherboard -- Gigabit BP6? -- that let you put two Celerons into modified "slocket" daughterboards and run them in SMP, including overclocked from a 66MHz FSB to 100MHz (IIRC).
I *was* paying attention.
I didn't do it, because I've updated benchmark suites to measure the performance delta between a smaller or larger on-chip L1 or on-package L2 cache, and the delta between uniprocessor and dual-processor performance.
At the time, and for the money, I'd rather have one faster chip, thanks.
But the bigger message is, as ever, missed:
If Intel could turn off FPUs and sell the result cheaper and still make a profit, or fit less on-package cache SRAM and still sell the result at a profit, then what that _really_ indicates is that there was a large profit margin on the full-spec full-price products. So big that a large chunk of it could be thrown away and more money spent to create a cheap version, and the company _still_ cleaned up.
It's dishonest marketing and I personally hate that.
Intel _could_ have lowered its prices on the full-fat products more, and still sold more units without selling intentionally crippled parts.
AMD and Cyrix and others had ways to undercut it. The IDT WinChip I mentioned in the article is an example: a lot of those went into SuperSocket 7 systems when Intel was fooling around with Slot 1.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
