alt Hacker NewsYes, because there weren't really CPUs then that had double the performance.
Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.
Workloads have different constraints however, and simply doubling cache, clock speed, or memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily double performance, especially when running more than one application at once. Keep in mind, this is Windows 98 /NT/2000 era here.
Symmetric multi-processing (SMP) could be of huge benefit however, far more than simple doubling any of the above factors. Running two threads at once was unheard of on the desktop. These were usually reserved for higher-binned parts, like full-fledged Pentium workstations and Xeons (usually the latter.) But Abit's board gave users a taste of that capability on a comparative budget. Were two cheaper than a single fast CPU? Probably not in all cases (depends on speeds). But Abit's board gave users an option in between a single fast Pentium and a orders of magnitude more professional workstation: A pair of cheaper CPUs for desktop SMP. And that was in reach of more people.
In short, two Celerons were probably more expensive than a single fast Pentium, but having SMP meant being able to run certain workloads faster or more workloads at once at a time when any other SMP system would have cost tons.
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Going from a single CPU to a dual CPU would, in theory, double performance _at best_. In other words, only under workloads that supported multithreading perfectly.
But in the real world, the perceived performance improvement was more than doubling. The responsiveness of your machine might seem 10 or 100x improved, because suddenly that blocking process is no longer blocking the new process you're trying to launch, or your user interface, or whatever.
>Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.
This had an interesting side effect: Celerons of that era overclocked extremely well (stable 300 -> 500MHz+), due to the smaller and simpler on-die L2 cache relative to the Pentiums of the era, whose L2 cache was much larger but had to be off-die (and less amenable to overclocking) as a result.
An overclocked dual Celeron could easily outperform the highest-end Pentiums of the era on clock-sensitive, cache-insensitive applications, especially those designed to take advantage of parallelism.