The latest installment of the processor wars has just been released and it is even more exciting than the previous one. Previously on Chip Wars : A research group, secretly funded by Intel, had released data suggesting that Intel produced faster chips than its arch rival. In this weeks exciting episode AMD have decided to strike back using the same tactics.
A recent document shown by AMD to its customers claims that Intel's new Celeron designs are all bark and no bite. The processors the document examines are the 1.8GHz and the 1.7GHz Pentium 4 Celerons that use the Willamette core and have a level two cache of 128K.
AMD claims that since most of these processors come with the i845G chipset they struggle to run some of today's latest entertainment applications. The document goes on to mention various quotes from the industry which, it claims, prove AMD's case. PC World's bark and no bite quotation is used, as is Keven Krewells' from Microdesign resources who says I think Intel's handling of Celerons represents a complete disregard for its customers.
The document also contains a chart, marked AMD Confidential, which graphically suggests that an AMD Duron 1.3 GHz processor outperforms a Celeron 1.7 GHz as well as a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz chip. The chart also shows the difference, in performance, between the Pentium 4 has double the performance of the Celeron (both at 1.7 GHz) and offers a comment stating Spot the MHz Myth.
AMD also offers a list of games which will not run under a Celeron with the i845G chipset. Those are Tiger Woods 2002, which won't play in hardware mode; Spiderman, which crashes and Nascar 2002 which crashes.
Intel would not comment directly on AMD's document but stated Our products are backed up by industry leading support capabilities, for example if a user experiences problems with a game they should check our Gaming Guide here, which lists all the leading games and any known issues and associated fixes.
You can find Intel's Gaming Guide here.
Intel Celrons are already in a transition period, at the end of which they will all carry a .13 micron core.
