Although the new Athlon XP and the Celeron run at the same speed, the two chips will be targeted at different segments of the market. Athlons generally are marketed against Intel's Pentium 4 for mainstream and performance PCs, while Celerons are aimed toward budget boxes. While Athlons don't churn as many computing cycles per second (measured by megahertz) as Pentium 4 chips, they perform more work per cycle. The Athlon XP 2200+, therefore, is more evenly matched against a 2.2GHz Pentium 4, say analysts. Because of the megahertz mismatch, consumers are "actually better off looking at the model number" for a measure of the chip's performance, Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, said in a previous interview. Still, because Intel has already come out with 2.4MHz and 2.53MHz Pentium 4s, the chipmaker holds the overall performance crown. AMD had claimed the upper hand in performance at various times from 1999 through 2001. But now, with Pentium 4's clock speed gains, there's no question that "the performance pendulum has swung back to Intel", McCarron said. The Athlon XP 2200+ is the AMD's first desktop chip made on the 130-nanometer manufacturing process, which means the chips are smaller, faster and less expensive to manufacture than their predecessors, which contained features measuring 180 nanometers on average. The chip costs $241 (£168) in 1,000-unit quantities but will likely sell for less because of discounts AMD provides to distributors and PC manufacturers. AMD earlier released a version of Thoroughbred 130 for the notebook market. Intel's new Celeron is the company's second version of that product line to be based around the architecture of the Pentium 4. Until recently, Celerons relied on a processing core from the Pentium III. Intel converted the Celeron line to Pentium 4 with the 1.7GHz Celeron in May. News.com's John Spooner contributed to this report.
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