Have you wondered why some Intel Pentium processors with a lower speed than a Celeron processor, yet selling at a much higher price?

Well, the main reason is because they have different L2 cache.

If you understand how processor works, you will know that the performance of the CPU is dependent on a lot of factors. The frequency (also known as clock speed), bus speed, L2 cache all play an important role.

The differences between an Intel Pentium processor and a Celeron processor are:

1. Cache

   Celeron processor usually have only 128KB of L2 cache while a Pentium processor have 2MB, which is four time as much. The amount of L2 cache can have a big effect on performance.

2. Clock Speed

   Pentium processor has a faster clock speed than a Celeron processor. The Celeron processor is a budget chip from Intel, that is why they set the Pentium chips to run at about 60 percent faster than the Celeron chip.

3. Bus Speed

   If you look at the specification of both processors, you can see that the usual bus speed for Pentium 4 is 800MHz or 1066Mhz while the Celeron is only 533Mhz. Due to these differences, the Pentium chip tend to run 30 percent faster than Celeron chip.

It seem that Celeron is of a much lower grade than its Pentium counterpart. On the positive side, a Celeron processor is cheaper and more affordable than a Pentium processor. If all you do is only check email or simple words editing, then a Celeron chip is really the one you should go for. For gaming machine, it is best to get Pentium 4 with the largest L2 cache and fastest bus speed.