AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

Business & Content Creation Performance

Business applications are far from the most stressful task you can make a CPU run.  As we’ve seen countless times in the past (especially with the very first Celerons with no L2 cache), data cache size and performance plays a very important role in performance here.  While the Athlon-C has a FSB bandwidth advantage (133MHz DDR vs. 100MHz DDR) the main performance advantage here comes from the Athlon’s much larger L2 cache. 

The Pentium 4 1.5 + i845 combination is able to slightly edge out the Duron 1GHz but a 2% performance advantage is hardly noticeable.  Convincing a large corporation whose IT department has normally purchased based on clock speed that the Pentium 4 at 1.5GHz isn’t any faster than a Duron at 1GHz is going to be a very difficult task for AMD. 

When armed with DDR SDRAM courtesy of the VIA P4X266 chipset the picture changes considerably.  If Intel wants to completely dominate the corporate/IT markets with the lower cost Pentium 4 solutions then they need to allow motherboard manufacturers to produce DDR i845 motherboards.

The standings don’t change much here in Content Creation Winstone 2001.  There is a 23% performance gap between the slowest CPU on here and the fastest, yet there is only a 50MHz difference in clock speed between the two.  Yet we wonder why so many continue to purchase based on clock speed alone; we can only benchmark, we can’t market.

Again you can see that the smaller L2 cache of the Duron is penalizing it considerably here.  This is of course what AMD wanted, to better distinguish the Duron and Athlon processors.  If the Celeron were on this graph its performance would be even lower because of similar desires to differentiate the Celeron from the Pentium III.