Intel has shipped two ultra-low-voltage Celeron processors this month as the company fills out its Sandy Bridge chip lineup for budget laptops.
According to the company, Intel’s dual-core Celeron 857 runs at a clock speed of 1.2GHz, has 2MB of cache and is priced at US$134 for 1,000 units while, the single-core Celeron 787 has a clock speed of 1.3GHz, 1.5MB of cache and is priced at $107. Both processors have on-chip graphics and draw 17 watts of power, Intel said.
Celeron chips sit at a lower rung of Intel’s processor family ladder and are used in basic laptops capable of word processing and Internet surfing. Celeron chips are commonplace in sub-$400 laptops with full-sized screens, a market where Advanced Micro Devices’ E-series and C-series chips also play.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini last week said more Sandy Bridge-based Pentium and Celeron chips would be released in the second half of this year. PC makers have not announced laptops with the new processors.
The Celeron chips lack some graphics, power-saving and speed-enhancement features found on the latest Core processors, which are also based on Sandy Bridge. Celeron does not include Turbo Boost, in which cores can be shut down to save power or cranked up to boost processor performance. Celeron also lacks Quick Sync, a hardware feature to convert high-definition video into a format suitable for smartphones and tablets in just a few seconds.
