The History of Dual Celeron

The idea of running two Celeron processors in parallel is not a new one. When it was first released, the Celeron was based on the same Deschutes core as the existing Pentium II CPUs, which could be run in multiprocessor mode without any problems. In essence, it was easier for Intel to add or remove external circuitry to disable SMP rather than remove the ability from the processor core itself. And that's just what they did.

Even with the on-die cache of the Mendocino core processors, it still wasn't worth the effort to completely reengineer the CPU to take out dual capability. Knowing this, it was just a matter of time before people figured out "fix" multiprocessing on the Celeron. Unfortunately, Intel did make it a difficult task to modify the SEPP design, and the number of power users willing to physically drill and solder their CPUs is understandably small.

The King of Dual Celerons

Now meet Tomohiro Kawada, webmaster of the Kikumaru Technical Laboratory. He is well-known as the man when it comes to Dual Celeron experimentation, and his site has the lowdown on all forms of this black art, from the cacheless Deschutes-core Celeron 266/300, all the way to the current 366/400Mhz SEPP and PPGA models available today.

Socket-370 Goodness

The infamous return of PPGA was designed by Intel to be the proprietary socket format to kill off Super7 once and for all. As evil-empire as it sounds, Socket-370 has introduced an interesting quirk into the dual Celeron story. Since the PPGA version of the CPU uses the same core as the slotted version, many manufacturers, including Abit, MSI, Asus, and Gigabyte have created Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter cards, which allow PPGA Celerons to function properly in the more fully-featured Slot-1 motherboards.

The twist is that all of the modifications that need to be made can now be done on these converter cards (informally called "slockets") rather than the CPU itself. This should save you the trouble and worry of tampering with an $80-$150 piece of equipment. What's more is that many manufacturers, such as MSI, have built in some of the dual-processor modifications straight into the product, requiring little modification.

According to Kikumaru's Converter chart,, slockets from MSI, ECS, PC Chips, Asus, TMC, A-MAX, Abit, Magic-Pro, and Soyo can all be modified to support dual-CPU operation, with varying modification requirements. Grabbing a couple of Abit AB-RS370 SLOTkets, we quickly got to work.