>Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.

This had an interesting side effect: Celerons of that era overclocked extremely well (stable 300 -> 500MHz+), due to the smaller and simpler on-die L2 cache relative to the Pentiums of the era, whose L2 cache was much larger but had to be off-die (and less amenable to overclocking) as a result.

An overclocked dual Celeron could easily outperform the highest-end Pentiums of the era on clock-sensitive, cache-insensitive applications, especially those designed to take advantage of parallelism.