Intel's new Celerons to further cement budget PC market

Intel is releasing two new Celeron processors for sub-$1,000 PCs, a market that is virtually an Intel colony. The Santa Clara, Calif.- based chip giant released Monday a 733-MHz Celeron and 766- MHz Celeron for budget PCs, said Jeff McCrea, director of Intel's desktop products group. "These will be the seventh and eighth Celeron products introduced this year," he said. PCs containing the new chips will likely come out within the next 30 days, he added. When computers with the new chips do arrive, they will be wading into a sea of Celerons. Because of hiccups in the launch of the rival Duron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel controls nearly the entire budget market. "In July, August and September, Intel had over 95 percent of the sub-$1,000 market at retail," said Steve Baker, an analyst at PC Data. Duron, a budget version of AMD's Athlon chip, first came out in June. Unfortunately for the company, chipsets containing integrated graphics chips were not available at the time. Integrating the graphics into chipsets cuts additional cost and has become a hallmark of the budget PC. The chipset is a necessary component on a PC motherboard that helps shepherd data between the processor and the rest of the computer.