AMD’s Duron Reaches The Giga Hertz Barrier – THG.RU

AMD Launching The Launch

You might find the headline a bit wacky, but it is just trying to describe AMD’s latest coup. Today AMD is starting to officially ship Duron processors running at a core clock of 1000 MHz or 1 GHz. For some strange reason however, AMD’s marketing department issued the press release announcing this event one day early, catching most publications by surprise, who had been prepared to publish their articles today rather than yesterday. The new pricing, which you will find further down the article, reached the reviewers at the same time as anyone else, because AMD was seemingly unable to inform us prior to the press release. You might find this whole issue rather meaningless, but it actually shows the state of AMD right now. I’d say it’s best described with the words ‘pure chaos’, meaning ‘more chaos than what we are already used to’ from the past.

Duron Now With ‘Morgan’-Core

It’s usually not very easy to get particularly excited about the release of a microprocessor that is running just a few percent faster than its predecessor of the same type. It is true that those articles always find a surprisingly large amount of readers, but for a reviewer it simply means another set of benchmarks combined with the surprising comment that this new processor is indeed a bit faster than the previous one. This time the story isn’t quite as plain though. Since the recent release of Athlon MP and AMD’s latest mobile processors we have already come to know AMD’s advanced versions of Athlon and Duron processors. The desktop system mass market however had so far not been blessed with any of AMD’s advanced processor versions. These times are finally coming to an end. The new 1 GHz Duron comes equipped with AMD’s stripped-down version of the already known ‘Palomino’-core, which goes by the name ‘Morgan’. Here are the differences over previous Durons:

• 180,000 more transistors, from 25 million to 25.18 million
• Different die size of 106 mm² and a different die shape
• 3DNow! Professional = full Intel SSE (streaming SIMD extensions) support
• Hardware auto data pre-fetch
• Reduced power consumption
• Running at 1.75 V, max current 26.3 A, max. power 46.1 W
• Thermal diode (?)

Duron Now With ‘Morgan’-Core, Continued

The socket remains the same, but you can’t just plug the new Duron in your old SocketA motherboard, because ‘Morgan’ needs to be recognized by the BIOS and that only works after you flashed the very latest BIOS-update onto the board. We tried it here with a good old Asus A7V rev. 1.02. Using an ‘old’ Duron or Athlon processor we flashed the latest BIOS (rev. 1008) on the A7V, then we plugged in the new Duron and the board booted without any problems. Windows reported SSE-support, which is the definite sign that the BIOS recognizes and supports ‘Morgan’ properly.

Motherboards that lack the BIOS-support for ‘Morgan’ will either not boot at all or they will not run the new processor properly or at least not report SSE-support (in e.g. WCPU or SiSoft’s Sandra). The same is actually valid for the (still upcoming) Athlon 4 processor (Palomino-core) for desktop computers, which comes with the same enhancement features. Once a motherboard is able to handle ‘Morgan’ it should also work with ‘Palomino’ and vice versa. The situation is a good test for the quality of your motherboard maker, because only the good ones supply BIOS-updates on time, the lame ones don’t. Asus is probably the best motherboard maker in regards to BIOS updates, but it still continues to overclock each and every processor by a fraction of a MHz to be able to win benchmark competitions.

What’s The Catch Of Morgan’s New Features?

Well, don’t expect too much. The new Duron won’t be a major amount better or faster than its predecessor, but the ‘Morgan’-core is certainly a reasonable win for its owners. The SSE-implementation can speed up the new Duron in applications that were once optimized for Intel’s Pentium III processor. The new core design reduces the heat production of the new Duron and the thermal diode can safe its life, even though the implementation is still not as fool proof as Intel’s. The other enhancements (hardware data pre-fetch, TLB-design changes) are also able to make ‘Morgan’ a little bit faster than before, so that Duron 1 GHz will be able to perform better than what the mere core clock increase from 950 to 1000 MHz would suggest.

Test Setup

We didn’t want to bore you with too many benchmarks, so we cut the test runs down to those that were done with the Tualatin processor we tested previously.

Benchmark Results

Sysmark 2001

The new Duron 1 GHz scores slightly better than its older sibling Duron 950. In the overall comparison Duron is still quite a bit slower than its Athlon cousins, which have four times the amount of L2-cache (Athlon: 256 kB L2, Duron 64 kB L2). Tualatin, the new Pentium III or upcoming Celeron processor is also able to outscore Duron, due to its 256 kB of L2-cache and its higher core clock.

The two sub-results of Sysmark 2001 don’t provide any additional information. Duron is behind the processors with the larger L2-caches.

Quake 3 Arena

A short note to the permanent complainers who still haven’t accepted that 3D-gaming tests at high screen resolution don’t make any sense in processor comparisons: The higher the screen resolution the larger is the impact of the graphics card. We want to test processor performance, so this impact is exactly what we want to avoid.

Duron 1 GHz benefits from its new enhancements and makes quite a significant step away from its sibling with the older design, the Duron 950. Even Athlon 1 GHz is not far out of reach anymore. It shows that Duron 1 GHz is quite a respectable gaming processor.

The processor intensive NV15-test doesn’t allow Duron 1 GHz to score a huge amount better than Duron 950, but its result is still rather close to the score of Athlon 1 GHz.

Dronez

The new ‘Morgan’-features seem to give Duron 1 GHz a clear advantage in modern games like Dronez. The difference to Duron 950 is rather remarkable and Athlon 1 GHz is in very close reach. Tualatin has a clear problem with this benchmark, scoring surprisingly bad.

Pricing

AMD dropped the prices again, as you can see in the following chart.

Summary

AMD ensured a prolonged life span for its value processor Duron with new ‘Morgan’-core. The performance difference to Duron 950 is large enough to justify the existence of Duron 1 GHz and the pricing will ensure the success of the first low-cost Giga Hertz processor. The majority of PC users should be very well satisfied with the performance offered by Duron 1 GHz, because its major performance lack lies in office software, which is anyway not restricted by processor performance, but by user input.

Now OEMs can market their low-cost Duron-boxes with the words ‘Giga Hertz’, which should ensure their success especially in markets where people aren’t particularly informed. AMD will have to live with the fact that a Duron that can boast “Giga” might impact the sales of the flagship processor Athlon. However, now that times are rough in the PC-business, it’s better to sell a lot of value products than no products at all.