Intel recently launched the Pentium E2000-series with the Pentium E2140 and E2160. These little beauties are Conroes (Not Allendales, which is interesting) with 1MB L2 cache running at "800 MHz FSB" and the virtualisation acceleration turned off. By comparison, the Conroe-L based Celeron 400-series has one core with 512kB L2 cache and none of the power management features.

Benchmarks demonstrate that cache/performance correlation is much less significant than the performance/cost ratio. For about 40% the cost, you get as much as 100% the performance of a 4MB equivalent (in photoshop) and as little as 80% the performance (in Quake 4). Sounds like a winner.