AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

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.