Leaked Intel documents seen by The Reg reveal that Celeron will finally move into the 1990s in 2001. The cheapo chip has been lumbered with a puny 66MHz front side bus ever since its inauspicious launch as the cacheless Covington in the latter years of the last century.

A new chipset, the i810e2 is also set for launch in Q1, supporting both Pentium and Celeron brands on a common motherboard design. There is possibly an interesting development here - the Intel document specifically mentions 'Pentium', not 'Pentium III' - is this a deviation from the corporate style guide, or an indication that both PIII and P4 chips will be supported? (Unlikely, given the differing number of pins involved - still, stranger things have happened at sea)

The Coppermine128 launches at 800/100 in 'early' Q1 2001 and the 100MHz FSB will then be adopted for all Celerons over 800MHz.

'Early' presumably means the first week of January - Intel's traditional time for pissing off folks who have bought Xmas PCs only to find them outdated a couple of weeks later.

The 810e2 will feature ATA-100, 4 USB ports, 6 channel audio and LAN support and Coppermine128 is now billed as 'the value PC solution', following the death of the ill-fated Timna SOC project. ®

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