Intel Celeron 600 "Coppermine128"

Memory Bus - 66MHz vs 100MHz

In order to illustrate the real world performance improvement achieved by using a 100MHz memory bus vs a 66MHz memory bus we used our VIA Apollo Pro 133A test platform which allows us to set the memory bus to 100MHz even if the FSB frequency is set to 66MHz.

In the following tests the CPU used is an Intel Celeron 600 running at 66MHz x 9.0, for the 100MHz memory bus tests the memory bus ran at 100MHz and for the 66MHz memory bus tests the memory bus obviously ran at 66MHz.

In spite of the multitasking nature of the Content Creation Winstone 2000 benchmark, the performance difference between the 100MHz memory bus and 66MHz memory bus is only about 4%. This illustrates the point that for most home office/business tasks, a 66MHz memory bus is still enough to perform at a reasonable level.

Considering the market Intel is targeting with the Celeron, this makes sense since most of the users in the Basic PC market aren't going to be running heavy 3D applications, etc...

Moving to the 100MHz memory bus results in a 6% improvement here which still isn't phenomenal but it's definitely more than we observed in the CC Winstone 2000 benchmark.

The reason behind the somewhat larger performance difference here is because SYSMark 2000 runs a variety of applications including SOHO applications but also 3D rendering, voice recognition and other such applications that are much more memory bandwidth intensive which is why the performance difference is larger here while at the same time not incredible.