AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

Final Words

With AMD’s current pricing on CPUs, it doesn’t make much sense for those in the enthusiast community to lust after the new Duron.  Your savings won’t be that great and in most cases, performance will be significantly lower than an equivalently clocked Athlon CPU.  There are some situations in which the performance of the new Duron will be able to come close to that of the Athlon; mainly in cases where the data that the processor is working with is very small in size or potentially very serialized in nature. 

For the corporate/IT markets, the Duron on any of today’s current DDR SDRAM platforms will offer performance comparable to the Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz / i845 solution.  At 1GHz the heat produced by the Duron isn’t too bad, and it’s actually lower than the Pentium 4 at 1.5GHz.  We all know by now that the reliability of today’s Socket-A DDR platforms is quite good.  Many of AnandTech web servers run off of Socket-A DDR platforms without ever crashing.  At the same time, Intel’s 845 solution is being praised as the next BX chipset.  It’s a tough choice to make but they are both solid paths; from a performance standpoint, the Socket-A platform promises greater potential as you can later migrate to Athlon solutions.

For the professional user, the choice again should lie away from the Duron.  With AMD’s current pricing you are not sacrificing much to go with an Athlon and enjoy the benefits of a larger L2 cache and even higher clock speeds for still a very low price.

System integrators and OEMs will find that the new Duron is great as it allows them to sell 1GHz computers while still shaving a few bucks off of their production costs. 

Finally for gamers, while the new Duron is definitely better for you all than the previous Duron because of its data prefetch, you are still much better off with either an Athlon or a Pentium 4.  Looking forward, games will definitely give you greater performance with the larger L2 cache of the Athlon or the hardware prefetch and memory bandwidth of the Pentium 4.

We started off this review describing how the Celeron grew stale over time by never being upgraded in ways other than clock speed.  AMD has already shown us that they don’t mind introducing new features to the already robust Duron with the release of the Morgan core. 

The real question is, how long will it take them to throw some more cache on the processor’s die?  AMD will be making the transition to their smaller 0.13-micron manufacturing process in the not-so-distant future.  The 0.13-micron Athlons and Durons will offer close to a 50% die savings over the current designs, yet so far we haven’t heard any discussion of L2 cache size increases for neither the Athlon nor the Duron.  Let’s hope AMD knows how to keep L2 cache sizes a secret better than Intel does…