If you pay close attention, you will find some stores selling “Celeron Centrino” notebooks. There is just one detail: Celeron Centrino does not exist.

In order to be called Centrino, a notebook must have three components: Pentium M processor, Intel 915 or 855 chipset and Intel/PRO wireless LAN. You can see this at http://www.intel.com/products/centrino/index.htm. So, notebooks based on Celeron M cannot be called Centrino because they are not based on the Pentium M CPU. Even notebooks based on Pentium M that don’t have Intel/PRO wireless LAN or Intel 915 or 855 chipset cannot be called Centrino.

The differences between Pentium M and Celeron M are basically the external clock rate and the amount of memory cache:

• Celeron M: 400 MHz external clock, L2 cache of 512 KB up to model 340 (and also on 353 and 373 models) and L2 cache of 1 MB on model 350 up. Click here to see a complete list of all Celeron M models and their technical specs.
• Pentium M: 400 MHz external clock on the models ending with a “3” or “5” and 533 MHz on models ending with a “0”. L2 cache of 2 MB from model 715 up (except model 718, which has 1 MB) and 1 MB on all other models. Click here to see a complete list of all Pentium M models and their technical specs.

At first calling Celeron M as Centrino wouldn’t be a problem. However, this causes certain confusion on the market. A “1.6 GHz Centrino” is faster than a 1.6 GHz Celeron M, since a Pentium M is faster than a Celeron M running at the same clock rate. The problem is the user buying a 1.6 GHz “Celeron M Centrino” thinking that it will achieve the same performance of a “real” 1.6 GHz Centrino, which won’t happen.