Intel Monday will roll out a long-awaited update of its Celeron processor equipped with Level 2 cache for the sub-$1,000 PC market. The Celeron 300A and Celeron 333, based on the so-called Mendocino design, perform at 300 MHz and 333 MHz, respectively. Priced at $139 and $179, they won't fatten Intel's profit margins, but they will give the company more competitive offerings for this low-end market.

Intel's first chips for the sector, the 266- and 300-MHz Celerons introduced early this year, were dogged by the performance hit they took from not having any on-chip L2 cache. The new Celerons have a 128k L2 cache on-chip, and, according to analyst Dean McCarron at Mercury Research, Scottsdale, Ariz., they offer performance very close to that of a Pentium II. Pentium II's have 512k of L2 cache.

Analysts expect the chips to be relatively well-accepted as they compete with offerings from Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix, and IBM. According to Mercury Research, for the first quarter of 1998, Intel held 75 percent of the market for processors designed into sub-$1,000 PCs. AMD followed with 11 percent, IBM and Cyrix each had 6 percent, and a number of smaller players held the remaining 2 percent.