SiS 730S Socket-A Chipset: Is the Duron allowed to succeed now?

We mentioned before that the SiS 300 graphics core integrated into the 730S chip had hardware motion compensation and iDCT support.  If you look at the above CPU utilization numbers you can see exactly how much headroom those features buy you.  The SiS 300 manages to cut the CPU usage numbers in at least half for the less complex DVD streams and even more than that for the more complex streams. 

While this doesn’t matter as much for a processor like a Duron 800 versus a K6-2 350, when you’re talking about using 50% of your CPU versus only using 15% the difference can be noticeable regardless of what processor you happen to have.