When the Celeron (Mendocino core) processor was first introduced its performance was outstanding and the value it offered was incredible.  As time moved on, the Celeron’s architecture remained the same and its features grew stale.  The performance gap between it and its older brother the Pentium III, increased as well.  We went from whole heartily recommending the Celeron at 300MHz to suggesting that you keep your distance at 800MHz.  The first chips were without a doubt very attractive, but without updating the chip itself beyond giving it SSE support it was bound to reach its limits. 

Just around the time when we grew tired of every Celeron release, AMD’s Duron came along and restored our faith in high-performance value CPUs.  In fact, we concluded our first review of the Duron processor with the very words: “value doesn't have to mean slow.”  Back then, well over a year ago, the Duron was running at an “amazing” 700MHz.  Unlike the Athlon processor that has gone from an introductory speed of 500MHz to a currently available 1.4GHz, the Duron was more than content under the 1GHz marker. 

We eagerly proclaimed the Duron to be the king of the value segment and also indicated its viability as a high-performance, low-cost solution as well.  Without the FSB bandwidth limitations of the Celeron and a very high L2 cache hit-rate there was almost no way that the Duron would fall victim to the same fate as the fading Celeron architecture. 

In fact, other than clockspeed, the only thing that separated the Duron from the Athlon was L2 cache size.  With a 64KB L2 cache, the Duron still performed within 10% of an equivalently clocked Athlon which happens to have 4 times the amount of L2 cache. 

Earlier this week AMD released the very first Duron CPUs running at 1GHz.  Unlike the previous few Duron releases, this one is actually the introduction of a new core design as well.  With AMD’s pricing structure so very aggressive, is the Duron as convincing of a buy at 1GHz as it was when it “only” ran at 700MHz?  That’s the real question we’re here to answer.

The Perfect AMD Platform?

Earlier this week we showed you a comparison of the four most popular Socket-A chipsets that are compatible with AMD’s Athlon and Duron processors.  For the most part, the DDR chipsets featured in that comparison performed within a reasonable margin of one another.  We concluded then that you can’t really go wrong with any of the DDR chipsets from a performance standpoint.  However the thing that made one of the contenders stand out among the competition was price.  The SiS 735 chipset can be found on a motherboard for less than $80; we have even seen advertisements for this particular motherboard (the ECS K7S5A) for $65. 

When the AMD 760 chipset was released it was crowned the perfect AMD platform because of its performance.  When the KT133A chipset made its way out the doors it took the crown because of its PC133 SDRAM compatibility during a time when DDR SDRAM was expensive.  Now the SiS 735 chipset assumes that very same title but mainly because its pricing mimics what AMD’s CPU pricing is currently.  Today you can go out and buy a Duron for as little as $25; are you really going to want to pair a $25 CPU with a $150 motherboard? 

It is for this reason that we chose to test all of the Athlon/Duron CPUs in this review on ECS’ SiS 735 based K7S5A motherboard.  The K7S5A’s latest BIOS includes specific support for the new Morgan core that this Duron 1GHz is based on.

The Chip

The Morgan core is to the Duron, what the Palomino core was to the Athlon.  In fact, you can think of the Morgan core to be the Palomino core with a 64KB L2 instead of a 256KB L2. 

Click to Enlarge

Out with the old and in with the new - Spitfire core to the left, Morgan to the right

The major enhancements boasted by the Morgan and Palomino cores are described in detail here in our Athlon 4 Technology Review.  Some of the key enhancements are:

• Data Prefetch
• SSE Support
• Improved L1 TLBs
• On-die Thermal Diode

Once again, you can read up on those enhancements and more here.

The 1GHz Duron is of course based on the Morgan core, while previous Durons were based on the Thunderbird derived Spitfire core.  All of the critical stats are listed in the below table:

CPU Specification Comparison
	AMD Duron	AMD Duron	AMD Athlon	Intel Pentium 4	Intel Pentium III	Celeron
Core	Spitfire	Morgan	Thunderbird	Willamette	Coppermine	Coppermine 128
Clock Speed	600 - 900MHz	1GHz+	750 - 1400MHz	1.3GHz - 1.5GHz	500 - 1000MHz	533 - 850MHz
L1 Cache	128KB			8KB Data	32KB
L2 Cache	64KB		256KB	256KB	256KB	128KB
L2 Cache speed	Core Clock
L2 Cache bus	64-bit			256-bit
System Bus	100MHz DDR EV6		100/133MHz DDR EV6	100MHz quad-pumped GTL+	100/133MHz GTL+
Interface	Socket-462 (Socket-A)			Socket-423	Slot-1/Socket-370	Socket-370
Manufacturing Process	0.18-micron
Die Size	100mm^2	106mm^2	120mm^2	217mm^2	106mm^2	106mm^2
Transistor Count	25 million	25.18 million	37 million	42 million	28 million	28 million

The chip needs primarily BIOS support in order to work properly.  As we mentioned earlier, the ECS K7S5A board we used in the review has Morgan support in its latest BIOS.

In terms of overclocking potential, the K7S5A limited our overclocking experimentation without having any adjustable multiplier or voltage support.  At 10 x 133MHz (1.33GHz) the Duron would POST but immediately reboot before even attempting to boot to the OS.  With some better cooling and a higher core voltage than its 1.75V default we’d expect the Duron to be able to hit 1.13 – 1.2GHz without too much effort.

AMD’s Pricing

Recently, Intel’s Pentium 4 has been gaining ground on the Athlon in terms of performance.  Especially in games, Intel’s upcoming Pentium 4 2.0GHz will be able to offer significantly higher performance than the Athlon.  In spite of this, the Pentium 4 continues to fall behind in our recommendations.  The main reason is AMD’s very aggressive pricing.  Currently, every single desktop AMD processor is available for under $130; that includes the fastest AMD Athlon now running at 1.4GHz.  Remember how excited we all were when we could find the fastest processors for $300?

The pricing on AMD’s Duron line is even more aggressive.  The 700MHz Duron that was introduced last June can now be found for $25.  This is cheaper than VIA is able to even make their lowest speed C3 processor.  Even the new 1GHz Duron is still officially only $89, with street prices almost guaranteed to push it much lower.  Without a doubt AMD’s cash crop is still the Athlon processor.  The Duron has gotten much more attention than it used to back when there were no platforms available for it, but it’s still not AMD’s primary focus. 

Aggressive pricing across their processor line has a few effects.  First of all, it almost completely avoids the problem of people using Athlon MP processors for their uniprocessor desktop systems.  The price premium you pay for an Athlon MP is generally not worth the performance benefits over an Athlon 1.4 for example. 

The second effect is that it is absurd to even think of any other chip manufacturer’s CPUs at this point.  Intel will aggressively drop prices on their Pentium 4’s at the end of this month but they will still be priced higher than AMD’s solutions on equivalently performing parts. 

The third effect and quite possibly the most significant actually has two parts to it.  On the one hand, this is helping AMD gain exactly what they need, market share.  On the other hand, AMD does not enjoy the higher profit margins that they once did.  Selling a Duron for $25 isn’t exactly going to be raking in the dough; this will eventually have to change as AMD grows both in size and in market share.  Enjoy it while it lasts.

New Competition

With the pending release of the i845 chipset from Intel, the Athlon and Duron will have a new competitor: the Pentium 4.  The Pentium 4 has been aimed at the high end of the market ever since its release, but now with a PC133 SDRAM chipset on the way Intel will begin positioning the “lower” speed grades as entry level solutions.  If you look at this from an enthusiast’s perspective, you’ll know that the Pentium 4/i845 combination isn’t the best option but that’s not what both AMD and Intel are concerned with.

The corporate IT market is where both companies are currently battling it out in order to gain those large contracts.  AMD is working non-stop to figure out how to gain more market share in the corporate world.  While they’re at around 30% in the desktop market, AMD processors are only at 20% in the corporate market.  Intel is positioning the Pentium 4 + i845 solution as the ideal solution for corporations because of its low cost and support for regular PC133 SDRAM.

This means that moving forward, the Duron and lower priced Athlon platforms will have to go up against the 1.4 and 1.5GHz Pentium 4s on Brookdale (i845) motherboards.  The release of VIA’s P4X266 chipset complicates things even more as it will be competing with both the i845 and i850 chipsets.  So there may be some desire to introduce P4X266 platforms into the same market that would have otherwise been serviced by the i845. 

By the end of this month the Pentium 4 1.5 and 1.4GHz processors will both be priced at below $140.  This still makes them more expensive than competing AMD solutions but much, much closer in price than they once were.

The Test

We chose a few different setups to compare the Duron; most of them in similar price areas (or they will be by next week). Before running the Duron 1GHz tests we performed a complete reinstall of the OS to ensure proper detection and enablement of SSE support for the processor.

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.

Office Application & Content Creation Performance

A higher speed FSB and a larger L2 cache are what give the Athlon such an impressive lead over the Duron in the Internet Content Creation portion of SYSMark 2001.  The two Pentium 4 platforms dominate here as they always have in this test.

Again we’re looking at cache dependent performance tests here with the Office Productivity suite of SYSMark 2001.  Unlike its Winstone counterpart, the SYSMark take on this test is much more like how most enthusiasts use their computers.  There is a significant amount of multitasking, virus scanning, web surfing, and checking email alongside normal tasks in Word and Excel among other such applications.  The two Pentium 4 platforms as well as the Athlon at 1GHz hold up the lead (there’s less than a 4% performance difference between them) while the Pentium III and Duron processors fall significantly behind (over 10% for the Pentium III, and about 28% below the Athlon-C for the Duron 1GHz). 

The overall performance according to SYSMark is inline with what we saw in the individual breakups of the tests.  The strong performance of the Pentium 4 in the ICC tests give it the noticeable lead here.

IT/Enterprise Computing Performance

Office Bench works very well for us as it provides performance statistics for various CPUs and platforms not only in one environment, but how well they scale as well.  In this baseline test the Pentium III, P4 w/ DDR SDRAM, and Athlon-C all perform identically while the same can be said about the P4 w/ SDRAM and both Duron chips.  The 10 second performance difference between the two groups is definitely noticeable.

Cranking up the loading level starts to separate the men from the boys.  The Athlon is able to hold a slight 5% advantage over the Pentium 4 running on the VIA P4X266, while the rest of the platforms are over 40% slower.  The Pentium 4 on i845 is penalized tremendously by not being given enough memory bandwidth (although interestingly enough it still performs well alongside the new Duron).  The Durons are penalized, however, for not having a large enough L2 cache.  Their 100MHz DDR FSB holds them back a bit as well, however L2 cache size plays a strong role in performance here.

Here’s where things get utterly disappointing and this is the benchmark that you must take away from this review and realize that the Duron isn’t the world’s best performer.  There are some situations in which the Duron will work just fine, especially in applications where L2 cache size isn’t important.  But in heavily loaded environments, such as those simulated by Office Bench 2001 it is clear that the Duron can’t cut it.

Even the Pentium 4 on i845 is able to outperform the Duron here.  In all fairness, the Duron was never intended to be used in these environments but it is worth proving that the Athlon’s cache size does come in handy.

3D Rendering Performance

We just got done mentioning that there are applications out there with much lower L2 cache size dependencies.  3D Studio MAX happens to be just one of those applications, where the rendering of a scene is more stressful on the floating point units of a CPU that it is dependent on a larger L2 cache. 

Here the Duron performs very well.  The 1GHz Duron only has a 5% clock speed advantage over the previous generation 950MHz Duron yet it manages to boast an 8% improvement in performance in this test.  Its hardware data prefetch is most likely the culprit.

3D Gaming Performance

Gamers will definitely want to opt for either the Pentium 4 or the Athlon.  Newer games are more dependent on L2 cache size and will not perform as well on the Duron.  We can see the positive effects of the new Duron’s data prefetch as the 5% clock speed increase results in almost a 10% performance increase here.  We know from our investigation of the Pentium 4’s performance under Quake III Arena that the engine benefits tremendously from well implemented data prefetch algorithms in the CPU. 

This is part of the reason why the Pentium 4 on the i845 doesn’t do too well here.  Without a large amount of memory bandwidth the Pentium 4 isn’t able to prefetch as much data from main memory into its cache, thus limiting the influence of its hardware prefetch tremendously. 

Once again the new Duron illustrates the value of its data prefetch.  At 1GHz the new Duron is 15% faster than the Spitfire based Duron 950.  If only every 5% increase in clock speed would give us three times the returns in performance. 

In the big picture however, even the new Duron is not able to catch up to the performance of its older brother. 

It seems as if AquaMark isn’t that dependent on L2 cache, either that or it is so very bottlenecked by the GeForce3 that the Athlon-C isn’t able to attain more than a 10% performance advantage over the new Duron. 

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…