Two Celerons?

Powers of Two

In so many ways, Intel's Celeron processor was truly the "CPU for the rest of us." Combining state of the art technology (no other shipping consumer processor has an on-die L2 cache), enough raw performance to go head to head with the flagship Pentium II (and Pentium III) line, and an absurdly low price point, what more could you ask for?

How about multiprocessing? When the Celeron was conceived, it was created specifically to be (or at least appear) inferior to the Pentium II, even though the processors are virtually interchangeable, and at one point even shared the same core. Among other things, this meant that the chip was intentionally crippled in some subtle ways to provide less functionality that the P2 cash cow. One of the main modifications made was to block the capability for running dual Celeron processors on a standard dual-processor motherboard.

While SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) immediately brings to mind images of high performance servers and workstations, it's once-prohibitive price point has been greatly diminished by the lowering cost of components (specifically of CPUs and dual-slot motherboards). Add to this the potential of being able to run sub-$100 Celeron processors in dual, and for once the average Joe has an excuse to toss out Win98 and jump on the power-user train.

But what are the advantages of running on multiple processors, especially compared to the Pentium II standard? Heck, how does it compare to a standard single-processor system? FiringSquad's rigged up a few dual-processor systems to test out the power of two, and here's what we found!