Duron slower than Athlon?

[Taz]

Just for a laugh, pop over to Anandtech and look at their AMD article and see if it makes any sense to you.

According to them the Duron as we all know is an Athlon with on-die L2 cache. The amount of L2 cache is still unconfirmed but guaranteed to be less than the Athlon. They provide a nice performance graph with Duron, (incorrectly labelled), Athlon, Celeron & P!!!. The 600Mhz Duron is marginally slower than the Celeron of the same speed but quite a bit slower than a 500Mhz Athlon!

When Intel released the Celeron's with on-die cache they performed close to PII's of the same clock speed due to the cache, although smaller, running at twice the speed. The Duron will have less cache running at twice, or more, the speed of the Athlon's but it also runs at the same FSB speed which the Celeron's don't so I would expect performance to be equal.

Am I gettting things wrong or are Anandtech speaking out of their arses or have AMD done something else to the Duron's to reduce performance in the same way Intel has with the Celeron II's?

[Wombat]

Anandtech usually doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't seem to give enough information there about what he's using for testing, anyways.

I won't say he's right or wrong, I'm just going to throw out his report.

[Greebe]

Robs 100% right, Anand (the spoiled brat) leaves out and or doesn't double check his handiwork/ verify any real problems he may encounter. Now I need to buy more salt.

[Himself]

LOL

[Taz]

The more I read on Anandtech the more dubious I am of the information there but I thought I would run it past you guys in case it was me that was missing something.

[DentyCracker]

I read somewhere that the Duron has 64k of L2 Cache. If that were true then I could see where it might be slower than the Celeron. I hope it has 128kb, cause I can't see it slower than a Celeron with the same amount of L2 Cache

[Wombat]

It might only have 64kB of L2 cache. That would make it cheaper to make. However, it has 128kB of L1 cache, vs. the Celeron's 32kB of L1.
That's part of what makes an Athlon so fast. It does a lot of OOO and prediction to support its deep pipeline, so it needs a pretty large L1 to keep the fetches efficient.

[dneal]

I believe the Duron uses 128K L1 paired to a 64K L2, which gives it greater total cache than Celeron, and I also believe that the Duron's cache is more asociative than Celeron's, whether that will help or not....

Don't forget Duron has a sizable advantage on the bus side of things. Celeron's 66MHz bus is downright pitiful.

Check out http://www.jc-news.com/pc/


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[DentyCracker]

Doesn't matter too much to me, if it's cheap enough, I'm getting one as an interim system.
(Duron that is)

[This message has been edited by DentyCracker (edited 05 May 2000).]

[Alfie]

Duron will be faster than a Celeron,may be faster than the classic Athlon(Classic?it's less than a year old!)
Anand benchmarks are dubious,I believe the sysmark 2000 he used heavily favors sse instruction.
All we can do is wait for the real world benchmarks,should be real soon!
Let's hope Greebe reads this and is ready to figure out how to overclock these!
Feed the rich and get poor or feed the poor and get rich!