A decade ago the Intel Celeron was known as the go-to processor for enthusiasts who wanted performance on a budget. You might recall the processor's early days when it could be aggressively overclocked, and more often than not users were happy to take advantage of the extra performance headroom. Celeron 300A running at 450MHz, anyone?

After its brief brush with popularity, the Celeron line faded away from view and became the boring budget processor Intel originally intended. In recent years it has been giving up market space to Intel's equally retired Pentium brand. Now, according to "major notebook makers," Intel may be planning to kill off the brand entirely.

The rumored demise of the Celeron is to occur in 2011, however Intel has so far denied any such plans. Regardless of the chip giant's claims, killing the line at some point is bound to happen, and why not as soon as next year considering that the few outgoing Celeron CPUs mostly overlap with other Atom and Pentium labeled products.