Is the sempron processor the equivalent as a budget cpu as say the celeron? also, what are the min/max speeds that are currently available?
The Celeron is a cut-down Pentium, and usually with less cache. I believe the latest ones have 256k of L2 cache. Anyway, it's the same story with AMD's Athlon->Sempron. The thing is, the performance delta's carry over as well. Now, if Intel get's the technology from the Pentium M's going into the normal Pentium D (and eventually the Celeron), you're going to have much better head-to-head competition.
Semprons are basically cut down Athlon XP Bartons (T/Bred Bs), they are meant to compete with the Celerons. The Pentium M was a very good chip, but was a totally different CPU and would probably not be transfered to the P4 series, since they are heavily based on NetBurst.