Intel has revised the delivery schedule for its Celeron Pentium II processors, and now plans to release two new versions of the chip before the year is out, an Intel official says.
Celeron is Intel's processor aimed at the low-end PC market, and was rolled out in April in a 266MHz version.
In the third quarter Intel will release a version of the processor that runs at 300MHz. That chip will be followed in the fourth quarter with a 333MHz version which will have 128K-bytes of Level 2 cache memory built into the same piece of silicon as the processor, Intel spokesman Seth Walker said.
Including the cache memory on the same piece of silicon should allow for better system performance by making the information in the memory more readily accessible to the processor.
Under its previous delivery schedule, Intel had planned to ship a 300MHz Celeron with on-board cache some time in the second half of the year, with the 333MHz version of the chip due in the first half of 1999, Walker said.
The company was able to revise its roadmap because the manufacturing process Intel uses to build the cores for its Pentium II processors has been more successful that the company expected, Walker said.
The chips are built using a 0.25 micron production process, which Intel is busy transitioning to from the older 0.35 micron technology.
Intel, in Santa Clara, California, can be reached on the World Wide Web at http://www.intel.com/.