>The pentium has a L1 cache. That means the cache is located on the
>board where the CPU is mounted. It is integrated into the cpu itself. The
>celeron and AMD have what is referred to as L2 caches.
Um, yes and no. All Pentiums (original, Pro, II, III 4, Celeron), AMD Athlon/Duron ALL have L1 cache on the chip die. The original Pentium had two 8KB L1 caches (for data and instructions). Starting with the MMX Pentium, all the Pentium now have two 16KB L1 caches. The K6-2 and K6-III both had two 32KB L1 caches while the Athlon series have two 64KB L1 caches. For trivia sake, the Pentium 4 has one 8KB data L1 cache. Instructions are fed to the processor by a new Execution Transfer Unit.
>The cache is
>remotely mounted from the CPU and isn't as fast. However AMD and
>later celerons make up for that deficiency by having larger caches. Of
>course I might be totally wrong about that since I never used a celeron.
Yes, you are totally wrong. ;-)
So let's take a look at the L2 cache situation. The Pentium, AMD K6-2 and the original Celeron (266 and 300) had no L2 cache. However, the Pentium II and the first Athlons both had 512KB of L2 cache outside the processor, sitting on a the printed circuit board alongside the processor (the infamous Slot 1 and Slot A packaging). Yes, this cache ran slower than the processor at only 1/2 speed and at 1/3 speed on the faster Athlons. The Celeron A and Celeron II have 128KB L2 cache. Another kink in this mess is that when Intel and AMD started putting the L2 cache back into the processor core the speed went backup for the cache. This occurred first when the Celeron was produced in the PPGA form for the Socket370 interface. The Pentium III brought the L2 cache back into the processor when it was released in the Flip Chip-PGA form and was reduced to 256KB in its Coppermine variant (slightly faster because it interfaced with the processor with a 256-bit bus as opposed to a 64-bit wide bus). For the Thunderbird Athlons, it too has reduced L2 cache to 256KB.
Hope you all don't mind the extended commentary, but let's keep our facts straight.