News was abound last week that Intel had informed notebook partners it was dropping the Celeron branding at some point in 2011. Rumour had it that the low-cost marque was under pressure from the power-sipping Atom range below and the slightly more powerful Pentium chips above, and would accordingly soon be taken off the market.

Crowded house

Intel’s line-up has become increasingly crowded as new branding has been introduced alongside older standards. With the Core 2010 processors occupying the high end, Core 2, Pentium and Celeron CPUs are left to split the mainstream and low-end of the market between them. Of those, Celeron has typically occupied the very lowest tier in Intel’s product lines. However, with Atom processors - especially the new dual-core chips for netbooks and nettops - becoming more capable the Celeron chips have become increasingly squeezed.

There are currently several Celeron models at retail for traditional and ultra-portable notebooks, and the three scheduled for release in September suggest that the chip maker hasn’t quite given up on the branding yet. At the same time, the fact that the upcoming dual-core Atom N550 is expected to cost manufacturers the same price as the single-core Celeron chips may hurt their popularity.

Celeron to live on

Intel won’t stop selling processors in the price or performance bracket that these chips currently occupy any time soon. However, the Celeron branding does seem to be becoming a little superfluous and it makes sense to simplify the choices for consumers. Intel, though, is dismissing the rumour and stating that the Celeron brand will be sticking around for a while after all. The company has come out to categorically dismiss this as a rumour. According to company spokesman Barry Sum, “The rumor is not true, Intel has no plan to phase out the Celeron brand in 2011. Intel Celeron processors continue to provide a low-cost computing solution for basic computing needs.”