The difference between PII and Celerons:

Well there is difference, the PIIs have 512K cache where as the Celerons have 128K.   Here's the thing the PIIs cache runs at half the clock of the processor, where as the Celeron's runs at the full proccesor clock.  That means that if you have a PII 400 the cache runs at 200, where if you had a Celeron 400 the cache runs at 400.  If you're wondering why this is I'll tell you.  As you may already know Intel was losing money to companies like Cyrix and AMD because they were makin comperable chips at a much cheaper cost.  Cyrix and AMD were makin alot of money off this and Intel was losing because all there chips were to much money.  Yes they were faster but alot of people were willing to sacrifice speed for cost.  So Intel decided to make a cheaper, more affordable chip, the Celeron.  The first thing Intel did to cut the price of the Celeron was to cut the cache from the PIIs, this severly reduced it's performance.   In addition to the cache Intel took away the the SEC cartridge.  This made the cleron about 50% cheaper to make, but the press didn't like this new chip made by Intel and went off on it.  It was much slower in buisness apps, etc.. So in wuick response Intel added 128k L2 cache to help get it make some speed.  This new Celeron was to be known as the Celeron A.  Now all Celerons are As.

As a matter of fact this new celeron was a realy nice chip.  I went over to Intel's website and tried to find a comparision between the PIIs and Celerons but couldn't.  But what I found was the results of CPUMark99 on each processor.  Take a look! and compare!