Should we expect great things from the Celeron now? I am still not so sure. Regardless, at least some improvement has been made on the bargain CPUs.

Intel’s desktop Celeron D chips are to be the latest processors to get the chip giant’s NetBurst core update, The Register has learned.

According to Intel documentation, Celeron model numbers 326, 331, 336, 341, 346 and 351 will switch from today’s E-0 core to the updated G-1 core on 2 December.

The G-1 core stepping will not only be compliant with European Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) regulations, courtesy of a “lead-free second level interconnect”, but add two new instructions to Intel’s AMD64-like EM64T 64-bit addressing system.

Intel is adding the LAHF and SAHF AMD64 instructions to its own 64-bit instruction set architecture. It has been alleged that they were missing from the original EM64T specification because the AMD documents used by Intel’s engineers pre-dated AMD’s addition of the two mnemonics.

LAHF and SAHF two instructions copy content back and forth between a 64-bit x86 processor’s status flags and its AH register. [Read the rest]