Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week) [LWN.net]

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 11:23 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week) by proski
Parent article: Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

To somewhat echo an earlier commenter

Intel's CPU naming policies tell you nothing any more except what market they expect to sell the processor into. If they think server makers will want a low-power 16-bit CPU with no MMU, they'd call it a "Xeon". If they want to position the exact same hardware as an entry-level consumer product it gets branded "Celeron".

You can only tell what's inside the CPU by either running tools to examine the CPUID values or getting the full model number and looking it up on Intel's technical pages.

Here's the relevant page for "Celeron 430" revealing it to be a low-end 64-bit part.

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/cele...

And here's the relevant page for the "Pentium Dual-core E2180", revealing that this is a dual-core version with twice as much cache (you'll more than need it for the additional core).

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/pent...

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Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 14:37 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I stand corrected. It was hard to believe that Intel would sell 64-bit processors under old names, especially Celeron. On the positive side, the x86_64 penetration must be higher than I suspected. Perhaps some good deals on "Pentium" and even "Celeron" laptops may actually be for 64-bit systems.