Intel Corp has killed its original ill-starred Celeron 266 and 300MHz low end processors. In what an Intel spokesperson described as spring-cleaning, the company has also dropped its Pentium PII 233, 266 and 300MHz parts. Intel has stopped manufacturing the chips, although they will be available on the firm’s order books until February of next year. The quiet canning of the original Celeron chips comes as little surprise, the parts were aimed at cutting down the costs of entry-level PCs priced between $800 and $1,200. However, they were built using cheaper Single Edge Processor packaging and lacked an L2 cache memory – meaning they were weak at tasks such as graphics processing. The resultant lackluster performance and their poor market reception, together with the lateness of its entry into the market for low- end processors lead to Intel releasing new versions with an integrated 128Kb L2 cache back in August (CI No 3,481) in an effort to rectify the original components’ faults.
