AMD Releases Duron 850 – THG.RU

Introduction

The PC market is in recession. Is it really a recession or don’t we rather want to speak of a reduced growth? It doesn’t matter whichever of the two you fancy more, since fact of the matter is that the consumers as well as the businesses out there find it harder and harder to come up with a reason for another PC purchase.

Performance or price cannot really be the reason, since the last 12 months happened to see the biggest performance battle in the processor business ever, resulting in a tremendous increase of system performance in a very short period of time. As a result of this battle the processor prices plummeted faster than ever.

The PC businesses wonder. If it ain’t the price nor the performance, what could it be? The only reason left is missing attractiveness. I can see it happening to myself as well. I rather spend a lot of money for a new top-notch and super-light mountain bike, dive gear or quality clothing than on another computer system. The performance of my PC is just fine for the work I do and the games I happen to play once in a blue moon. My PC is over a year old! Shocking!

To the PC-business it doesn’t matter whatever the reason is. The show must go on and PCs need to sell. The oldest trick in the book is to offer a nicely polished product for a price that is simply irresistible. This brings us to the low-cost systems and hence to the low-cost processors.

Is Duron A Success Or A Failure?

Ugh! What a shocking question! Well, from my old-fashioned (what can I say, I am the oldie in the PC-technology reviewers scene on the web) perspective of price vs. performance, Duron is anything but a failure. AMD’s low-cost processor has in fact the best price/performance ratio that has ever been seen in the computer business. Still it doesn’t sell as well as AMD wishes. Why is that?

Things That Count For A Low-Cost PC

In the very low-cost PC sector the actual processor performance is not half as important as the marketing power behind it. Let’s be honest. The average low-cost system is a strange box in terms of technology. The system maker puts a pretty well performing processor in it, because it is the most important topic in terms of selling-power. This processor is sometimes teamed up with a pathetic slow graphics card that usually represents the graphics technology from one or two years ago or the graphics are even integrated into the chipset, making them even slower. Then there is a reasonably sized but reasonably slow hard drive, little memory and other cheap, but well sounding devices, like a (AC97) modem or (AC97) sound. The whole system is using a low-cost chipset with integrated everything-but-a-coffee-machine, which happens to diminish the processor power even further. What you have in the end is a box that has the processor-label on it for marketing purposes, but its performance is light years away from what a system with this kind of processor could really offer.

How Much Performance Is Really Required?

Funny enough the above described low-cost system is still well-capable to run the majority of tasks thrown at it, simply because today’s processors come with an abundance of processing power that even survives the toughest castration-measures of low-cost box providers. The problem however is that systems that are way over one or two years old are just as capable to run those mainstream applications, because the software hasn’t improved or changed enough to force an upgrade.

Even the performance-fanatic crowd of ‘serious’ 3D-gamers is missing more and more reasons for new systems, because the 3D-gaming performance of a system is hardly limited by anything else than the 3D-card these days. Once you play a 3D-game at a high screen resolution of above 1024×768, a dirt-cheap Duron performs almost as well as an expensive Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz.

Do We Need Faster Processors?

O yeah, we always do! It’s for the same reasons why we need a new car, new shoes or even a new house. Sure, the old car drives from A to B as well, the old shoes are not falling apart either and the old house was nice and comfy too, but you feel better in your new car, in your new shoes or your new house. You feel better for yourself and you feel better in front of others. Isn’t it a bit embarrassing to admit that your car is old? Well, it’s just as embarrassing to tell others that you are still using a Socket7-system, even though this system is doing all that you require it to do.

Faster Low-Cost Processors

Now a Duron or Celeron system might not be as reassuring, comforting or impressive as the latest Athlon or Pentium 4 PC, but it is dirt-cheap. That is what brings us back to the PC business. The show must go on! You can buy a 700+ MHz PC for tempting little money and that’s the catch. Somehow systems need to be sold and the low-cost systems are lately so cheap that it’s extremely difficult to resist. The processors inside those boxes need to have a high MHz-numbers, even though this number may not say anything much about the system’s performance. That’s why Intel released the most ‘magnificent’ Celeron at 800 MHz last week, the first Celeron with 100 MHz processor clock, and it’s also why AMD launches Duron 850 today. The aching PC market is hoping that these new MHz-numbers might help the sales of a few more systems.

The Positive Side

I have to apologize. Yes, I was probably nagging a bit too much. In some way the release of extremely cheap but very fast processors is of course a blessing as well. We actually could do really impressive things with them and there are certainly a lot of people who do. Today’s systems are so much faster than what you could buy for the same amount of money a year ago. There are processor intensive applications that benefit tremendously from the increased processor performance and there are certainly a lot of people on a budget, who are finally able to afford systems that run their complex applications well enough. Those people have all reasons to rejoice. One year ago the top-notch processors were Pentium III or Athlon at 800 MHz. Systems with the new Duron 850 will costs only a fraction, but supply almost the very same performance.

AMD’s Duron 850 Processor

Technically Duron 850 is nothing particularly exciting. It is using the same core as previous Duron at 600-800 MHz, it runs at the same 1.6 V and it has the same processor bus clock of 100 MHz or 200 MHz DDR. There is nothing wrong with that, because Duron has been an excellent performer since its release in June 2000 and at 850 MHz it will continue to easily beat any competitor in the low-cost segment and even some in higher segments as well. Intel’s Celeron has never been a match for Duron in the past, and Intel’s desperate but late switch to the 100 MHz Celeron processor bus doesn’t make any difference whatsoever.

Duron 850 is also sharing the bad sides with its predecessors. It produces a lot more heat than Intel’s Celeron or Pentium III processors and it is also lacking a thermal protection. The latter can easily lead to a sudden heat-death of Duron, in case the heat sink was not mounted properly or the heat sink’s fan should cease to work. Besides that Duron used to suffer from the fact that it was requiring the same SocketA-platforms as Athlon, which happened to be targeted to the high-end segment, making them rather expensive. Now there’s finally two low-cost chipsets with integrated 3D-graphics available for Duron as well, VIA’s Apollo KM133 and SiS’s 730 chipsets. These two new platforms will ensure the production of extremely inexpensive Duron systems.

Celeron 800 – A Worthy Competitor?

Last week Intel launched Celeron 800. This might not really excite anyone and in fact my pulse hasn’t risen about this news as well, but it is worth to point out that Intel has finally left its path of ‘we castrate Celeron with 66 MHz bus clock to the bitter end’. The new Celeron 800 is indeed running at a 100 MHz processor bus clock (or FSB). This fact is able to improve its performance quite a bit, but unfortunately not enough to compete against Duron 750-850. Basically Intel is trying to prolong the lifespan of Celeron even further and sadly enough it will most likely be a successful attempt. From a performance standpoint Celeron has hardly any justification anymore, at least not against Duron and certainly not for its price.

Overclocking Of Duron

In terms of overclocking Duron is also way better than its wannabe competitor from Intel. All Durons from 800 MHz upward run reliably at 1000 MHz and that without taking the risk of beyond-spec bus and AGP clocks as required for Celeron. This is why for overclockers the Duron 850 is a rather uninteresting product. Even the first Duron processors could easily be overclocked to 850 MHz and more. Only speeds of beyond 1000 MHz are virtually impossible to reach with AMD’s low-cost processor, as we saw in our tests with the Vapochill cooling solution. Even at sub-zero temperatures Duron would hardly go higher than 1050 MHz.

For owners of SocketA motherboards with built-in overclock features the Duron processor only needs to have its L1-bridges shortened, which can easily be done with a thin pencil. After shortening the bridges and a test run to see if the multiplier can be adjusted to different settings it is wise to secure the thin pencil lines with some tape and the overclocking can begin. If the motherboard doesn’t support the alteration of Duron’s 1.6 V supply voltage you can additionally shorten the two open L7-bridges as well to reach 1.85 V.

SocketA-Motherboards that don’t support overclocking make the story a bit more difficult. Here the easiest way is to additionally shorten all L6-bridges and then solder some wires to the BP_FID pins on the motherboard and connect them to either ground or Vcc according to the BP_FID settings for the required multiplier. This lets you alter the multiplier up to x11, which is more than enough for Duron processors.

Finally there are now SocketA-motherboards becoming available that support 133 MHz processor bus clock. Duron does not officially support this new bus clock yet, but it works just fine. A Duron overclocked to 1000/133 MHz will give you improved performance over a Duron overclocked to 1000/100 MHz.

Test Setup

Benchmark Results

The results in BAPCo’s good old Sysmark2000 show Duron outperforming Intel’s new Celeron 800 flagship from Duron 750 onwards. Duron 850 is also almost as fast as an Athlon 750.

In Quake 3 Arena Duron benefits from its better FPU compared to Celeron 800, so that even the cheapest Duron at 600 MHz is already providing a better 3D-gaming performance than Celeron 800.Again, Duron 850 is pretty close to Athlon 750.

Benchmark Results, Continued

In the Linux Kernel compilation Duron falls quite a bit short of Athlon, which is obviously due to its smaller 64 kB L2-cache. However, Duron is once more able to beat Celeron 800 with ease.

The FPU-dependent 3D Studio Max benchmark shows that Duron shares the same FPU with Athlon, making it perform on par with its bigger brother and leaving the Intel-competition with its comparably weak FPU behind.

Price Comparison

The prices taken from Pricewatch this morning show how ridiculously overpriced Intel is still selling its processors. Comparing this graph with the performance numbers above makes you wonder why anyone would spend any money on Celeron or Pentium III. What’s irritating is the fact that right now Duron 850 sells for exactly the same price as its bigger and faster brother Athlon 850. From that point of view there’s obviously no point choosing Duron 850, because Athlon is clearly the more attractive processor. However, I expect Duron 850’s price to drop under the price of Athlon 850 very soon. All in all each AMD-processor is almost obscenely cheap.

Summary

Duron 850 is the logical consequence to Intel’s Celeron 800 launch and therefore nothing particularly exciting. The fact that Athlon 850 is already available at the same price point however doesn’t make the new low-cost AMD-processor exactly attractive right now. Nothing has changed in terms of relative performance. Duron is still faster than Celeron, while selling at a lower price point as well.

Low-cost systems will become even faster, offering almost the same performance as a one-year-old high-end system. Duron’s tough days in this segment should be over now that VIA’s Apollo KM133 and SiS’s 730 high-integration/low-cost chipset have become available. Buying Celeron today can only be seen as a mistake as this processor is slower and more expensive. From a common-sense point of view there’s hardly any justification for Celeron at all. However, believe me, the PC business is as far from common sense as the Earth is distant from Andromeda. I have learned to live with it and it certainly gives me enough reasons to smile when walking through large PC retail shops while looking at their PC-offerings. Don’t forget that we are facing ‘reduced growth’. Let’s feel a bit sorry for them.