Intels"s latest developments around future Celeron performance make for an interest study in marketing. It appears that once again, Intel Marketing folks are steering the engineering team, and it shouldn"t surprise anyone, since the Celeron has always been a marketing phenomenon more than an engineering product.
See Intel to shift P4 Celerons to Northwood core
History Lesson
The origin of the Celeron, for those of you more recently come to the party, was a marketing coup for Intel, whereby they managed to create an artificial segmentation of their CPU market.
First string Pentium chips from the outset were always engineered for whatever performance the engineers could squeeze out of their fabs, with perhaps a lead time of up to a year of newer and faster dies warming shelves as the clock speed increases were managed and measured out.