AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

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.