I had a Duron chip that, for like two full years in the early '00s, would've required an Intel chip about double the price to beat it. That was wild. I assume the Celeron line in particular only hung on through that period via contract-inertia and brand recognition, because it was a total joke next to Duron, on a bang-for-your-buck basis.

Like I did (at the time) high-end gaming on it, back when gaming used to sometimes tax your CPU and not only your GPU, and in that entire time I didn't ever feel like I would have benefitted at all from an upgrade, it was so far ahead of the curve. And that was AMD's budget chip line! They simply didn't deliberately cripple it nearly as much as Intel did their Celerons.