Through most of the early Celeron vs. Pentium II comparisons, many of the available games didn't really push the 3D gaming envelope and did not exhibit large performance gains between the 66 and 100 MHz FSB. Today, with incredibly detailed games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament dominating the shelves, Intel just might have held onto their 66 MHz FSB card a little too long. Even more surprising is the fact that the new 400-500 MHz Mobile Celeron processors have already been fully transitioned to the 100 MHz FSB.
Another oft-forgotten factor of sticking with the 66 MHz FSB are the extremely high multipliers needed to run at such high core speeds. The Celeron 600 employs a 9X multiplier to reach 600 MHz, which is even higher than the current 8X limit available on most motherboards. Overclockers will see the issue right away, since even a slight increase to the FSB will mean a huge 9X increase in overall core speed.
When Intel first announced that their new line-up of Mobile Celerons would support Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), you could hear a buzz on the street. After all, where Celeron processors are concerned, there have really been few issues from a price-performance basis. Even without overclocking, the higher-end Celerons can still remain competitive with lower-end Pentium III processors. What the value market really wants is to get on the SSE bandwagon, instead of just watching Intel tout the technology through their TV commercials.
As expected, the Intel Celeron 600 does support Streaming SIMD Extensions. SIMD translates to Single Instruction, Multiple Data, and is an Intel architecture designed to speed up floating point operations. This is much the same as what MMX did for Integer calculations. SSE consists of approximately 70 new floating point, integer and memory management instructions, defines a new register set and allows a prefetch bypass straight to the processor's L1 cache. All of these enhancements can have a very noticeable impact when using SSE-enhanced 3D games or multimedia applications.