Intel halts Celeron by 2011 in favor of dual-core Atom

Rumors of Intel canning their Celeron CPUs may be true, with DigiTimes reporting that the company has informed manufacturing partners that the low-cost processors will be phased out sometime in 2011.  The change will leave more room for the new dual-core Atom CPUs, such as the N550, which will arrive in Q3 2010 at similar prices to the current Celeron chips.

There are still a few Celeron launches left before the line sees its demise, with the Celeron P4600 ($86 in 1,000 tray quantities), T3500 ($80) and U3400 ($134) all expected to debut by the end of September.  In contrast, the dual-core N550 is expected to be priced at $86.  ASUS and Acer were both tipped as freezing new netbook launches until mid-August until Intel