Celeron-G: Intel Lowers The (Sandy) Bridge

[PGHammer]

Lost amidst the (understandable) hoopla over Sandy-Bridge-E delays was the emergence of even lower-end Sandy Bridge CPUs than the Pentium-G: Celeron-G440, Celeron-G530, Celeron-G530T, Celeron-G540, and the embedded-only Celeron-P1053 (which is the only single-core Sandy Bridge CPU).

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/288/Intel-Celeron-Desktop-Processor

As is the case with the Pentium-G, there's no support for the fancy features such as QuickSync or InTru3D (it also has lower graphics capability than the Pentium-G) - however, it is meant to basically replace the LGA775 Celeron DC E3xxx at the low-end of Intel's desktop CPU price curve. No idea if these Gs support Hyper-V (the same is true of the Pentium-G) - however, like the E3xxx in LGA775, these are *gateway processors* (they are LGA1155, thus they can be replaced with at least higher-end Sandies, or even Ivy, depending on the motherboard).

They are already available in some quantity at the Usual Suspects.

 

[Ryokurin]

They did it for two things, competition towards the E-350, and they can't hide that the Atom and Celeron 900s are pretty much inadequate for systems today even in the low end. It made no sense to me why over the past year or so once you got under $400 performance just fell off a cliff. It used to be that things would just eventually filter down to that range but up until around 4 months ago that range was pretty much the above mentioned chips. I got a 5 year old laptop that I've been itching to replace, but only have around $500 to spend but I still use because almost all of the systems other than closeout ones have weaker processors than that system and it was midrange too when it was new.

 

[DanNeely]

The P1053 was launched 18 months ago. It's not a sandy bridge. (The lack of an IGP should've been a giveway.)


Edit: The new celerons all have VT-x and will support standard hardware virtualization; none have VT-d support but intel has never enabled that on cheaper consumer CPUs.

 

[PGHammer]

The P1053 was launched 18 months ago. It's not a sandy bridge. (The lack of an IGP should've been a giveway.)


Edit: The new celerons all have VT-x and will support standard hardware virtualization; none have VT-d support but intel has never enabled that on cheaper consumer CPUs.

Hyper-V doesn't require VT-d - however, it does require support for second-level address translation (SLAT). While it is present in i3/i5/i7, I have no idea if this is present in the G models - Celeron or Pentium.

 

[PGHammer]

They did it for two things, competition towards the E-350, and they can't hide that the Atom and Celeron 900s are pretty much inadequate for systems today even in the low end. It made no sense to me why over the past year or so once you got under $400 performance just fell off a cliff. It used to be that things would just eventually filter down to that range but up until around 4 months ago that range was pretty much the above mentioned chips. I got a 5 year old laptop that I've been itching to replace, but only have around $500 to spend but I still use because almost all of the systems other than closeout ones have weaker processors than that system and it was midrange too when it was new.

Obviously you ignored the Celeron E3xxx and Pentium E5xxx - as did OEMs outside the enterprise/corporate/government space (Dell and HP sold, and still sell, quite a few portables and desktops with LGA775 low-end CPUs, which will doubtless be replaced by G models).

While I can understand *somewhat* why folks here at [H] would cast a hairy eyeball over a CPU as plebian as the E3xxx (despite the basis being the more-acceptable Core 2 Duo), OEMs wanting to step above Atom ignoring it should be embarrassed for doing so. Atom, in terms of where it sat, started off below the Celeron 900, which was itself replaced by the E1xxx, followed by the E3xxx, and had one reason for living - long battery life. As you correctly point out, Atom is not anything to write home about performance-wise; however, portables at that end of the price scale are even now being replaced by tablets and iPads - basically, hardware running a non-OS (iOS or early Android). (By "non-OS" I mean something other than OS X, Windows, or a standard Linux - something at home with low-performance processors that is meant for content consumption; not performance).

Therefore, I would look at low-end Dell or HP notebooks with Celeron or Pentium CPUs.