Actually the Pentium & Celeron brands aren't really whole lot different than their higher end counterparts like Core i3/i5/i7. The main difference still is core count, cache and clock. Minor things also apply now such as hardware threads & TurboBoost, but the underlying architecture is quite similar.

The Celeron 430 used in the tests is based off the Conroe core which is what Core/Core2 products used. Just with less cache and slower front side bus.

I think the point was that a CPU which retailed for $50 5 years ago, beat out a bunch of exotic and more costly setups.

I do remember at one point the celeron had a very locked (like 66mhz while the good stuff was 133mhz) front side bus.

But again, if you don't need FSB performance, it's not actually a loss but a net gain - same calculations for less money.

Yeah the original Celeron was absolutely horrible without any L2 cache and the slower bus. Once the Celeron 300A hit the scene, it became pretty respectable.

I think mostly because that thing was so easily overclockable. I remember running my dual 366A on an Abit BP6 to 550, perfectly stable on Windows XP with stock cooling.

Well, you could also put them on slot-1 cards and solder them up to do dual processor. Saving yourself a few hundred bucks in the processes. For the money they weren't that bad a deal.

IIRC Atom is a very different internal architecture.