Call it a sign of the times: Intel’s budget-minded Celeron line has just entered the dual-core age. The new high-end Celeron, the 1.6Ghz E1200, sports 512K bytes of cache and an 800Mhz front-side bus; it’s available now for $53 in quantities of 1000. While it’s not quite cutting-edge (the E1200 is manufactured using a 65nm process, as opposed to the 45nm process used for Intel’s high-end chips), it’s definitely a big step up for the Celeron and brings all of Intel’s chip lines into the multi-core era. No word yet on what the future holds for the rest of the Celeron line, though more dual-core CPUs seems like a safe bet at this point.

For more on the Celeron E1200:
– see this PC World article