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September 10,2000 The Duron's Run, Flight of the Thunderbird Duron and Thunderbird are here. Right now, in the Philippines. These are Advanced Micro Devices' latest offerings of processors. The Duron is targetted for the value market, or more specifically, to compete with Intel's Celeron; while the Thunderbird is slated to slug it out with Intel's Pentium III. AMD has surprised, and shocked, Intel with last year's
August release of the Since then, both camps had been at its other's tail, claiming the performance crown in the x86 processor arena. So where do the Duron and Thunderbird come in? To find out, we made a test drive of these Socket A processors. We are lucky to have friends ( from Asiantech--the sole authorized AMD distributor in the local market) who gave us the chance to play with these new AMD socket A cpu's. And we're proud to give you what we believe is the first ever review of the Duron and Thunderbird by a Philippine hardware site. Just as a background information, Duron contains 25 million transistors and takes up 100mm˛ of die space. Thunderbird contains more transistors:37 million, and takes up 120mm˛ of die space.It that information does not strike you in any way, try this: that's millions of transistor in an area about the size of the fingernail in your thumb! (Below are the comparative images of the Duron and the Thunderbird socket A processors)
Your Credit is Good but we need Cache! Ok, the Athlon has managed to snatch, albeit temporarily the performance record from Intel's Pentium. But with the on-die, on speed L2 cache of the Pentium and the Celeron, Intel came back with a vengeance. Remember, the L2 cache size, and speed significantly affects performace (Generally, processor with the bigger and faster L2 cache comes out ahead in the same MHz grade). It is clear that AMD has to go the same path taken by Intel, and this AMD did in the Thunderbird and Duron. Duron has 64K of L1 data cache, 64K of L1 instruction cache--a total of 128K of L1---and, more important among other features, a fully pipelined, three-way floating-point engine. In contrast, the Celeron has only 16K of L1 data and 16K of L1 instruction cache (a total of 32K). The Duron sports 64K of full speed 16-way set-associative L2 cache. In comparison, Intel's Celeron has 128K of 8-way set-associative L2 cache, or twice the L2 cache of the Duron. However, AMD notes that the Duron's total on-chip cache, including L1 cache, is 192K, compared to the Celeron's lower 160K of on-die cache. The AMD Thunderbird uses 256K of L2 cache, giving it a total of 384K of on-die cache. Also, the Duron and Thunderbird's cache design is that their L1 and L2 cache are exclusive, meaning , it is not necessary for data to be duplicated in both L1 and L2, unlike Intel's inclusive cache system in its processors. According to AMD this increases the usable on-die cache size of the Duron from 64K to 192K, while the Celeron only has 128K of usable on-die cache. With the on-die cache, AMD no longer needs a circuit board to place both the cpu coar and the external cache chips (this was the reason why Intel and AMD had to use the cartridge type design for their processors). AMD Thunderbird, the Duron will use the new Socket A, 462-pin form factor. This socket packaging is less expensive than Slot A to manufacture, and also allows more flexible system designs. Socket A is analogous to Intel's Socket 370 FC-PGA connector. Both Duron and Thunderbird are manufactured on .18 micron aluminum interconnect process. Thunderbird and Duron use the same 100MHz double data rate (equivalent to 200MHz) front side bus the Athlon used since its introducton. This FSB provides the processor a lot of elbow room of bandwidth to talk with the chipset, giving the AMD processors added boost in performance. Compared with Celeron's 66MHz FSB, Duron's 200MHz FSB speed is a little more than three times the frontside bus speed of its targetted competition. The Pentium III, on the other hand uses 100MHz FSB (with the highly regarded BX chipset) and, more recently, 133 MHz. Test Setup and Benchmarks AMD Platform Specifications:
Common Hardware Specifications
After fresh installation of each test system, each one is re-booted and defraged. Each benchmark suite/software was executed 3 times and the results averaged.. All benchmark test are run at 1024x768, 32-bit color @85Hz, unless specified otherwise.
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Athlon 550 vs. PIII 550 review Elite 2-in1 Motherboard Review
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Site Designed and Published by Ronel H. Pelovello |
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Athlon, which took out the speed and performance
title from Intel, the latter has recovered and made some modifications in its processor
line. This changes include putting the L2 cache on the same silicon die as the processor
core, enabling it to run the same speed as the cpu. 
