AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

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.