Intel Celeron 300 'A'

After having their wrists slapped by customers who bought the poor Level 2 cache-less 266 and 300MHz versions (Covington Core) of the Celeron (or Celery as it became known), the new A-Variant (Mendocino Core) Celeron finally got 128k L2 cache which increased its performance exponentially. For the first time, the L2 cache was placed onto the CPU die instead of having it external on the mainboard or soldered onto the cpu module.

By running the L2 cache at full speed instead of only half-speed like the Pentium-II did, these chips were pretty fast and in some cases on par with its big and much more expensive brother (When was the last time anyone said that about a Celeron?). The 300MHz variant was especially suitable for overclocking, mostly by just altering the FSB speed from 66MHz to 100MHz which usually still gave a rock-stable system. This Celeron comes in a Slot-1 package and was produced in Autumn 1998.