Since 1998, Intel has created Celeron CPU in cycle with its Pentium line. In 2000, Pentium line was slowly changed with Intel's "Core" CPUs, but they keep on generating a width of Celeron choices. There are some key differences between two technologies.

CPU Cache Basics

1. CPU cache is a tiny chunk of memory placed on CPU die itself. This memory works much quicker than other memory somewhere else in PC. The bigger the cache, greater the CPU's potential for performance.

Celeron Cache

2. Intel has usually approved their Celeron CPUs a smaller cache than equal Pentium CPUs. This gap has ranged from 25-50 percent over years. A Celeron usually executes slower, but it is cheap as it has less complex technology.

Celerons and Overclocking

3. For first several years of their survival, Celeron CPUs had a status for high "overclocking," a procedure where user manually sets CPU to execute beyond its factory specifications. This can cause extreme heat and system errors, but tradeoff was near-Pentium performance at Celeron prices.

What Enabled Celeron Overclocking

4. Many active transistors in CPU mainly state amount of heat it produces. As Celeron CPUs had caches that were partly inactive, these CPUs could be overclocked significantly without heat or system errors becoming a severe problem.

Celerons and Pentiums Today

5. New Celeron CPUs have many processing cores, and some can support hardware virtualization. Intel's "Pentium Dual-Core" line is still one tier above Celeron, but their "Core" CPUs like i5 and i7 are now their top-tier desktop processors.