Introduction

I wonder if someone high up at AMD has recurring alarm set in Outlook that beeps "Release a new processor this week". No sooner do we take a look at AMD's current performance pinnacle, the XP2000 than the NDA is lifted on a new processor and the whole cycle starts again.

However this time things are a little different. Sometimes I forget that AMD also competes in the supreme value segment and sometimes not everyone needs the raw power of an AthlonXP. For those people, AMD create the Duron. As you might well know, AMD introduced something it calls Quantispeed for the jump to the AthlonXP. Quantispeed is a set of core enhancements over the old Thunderbird core that make the AthlonXP faster than an equally clocked Thunderbird.

Since the Duron's 1Ghz birthday, it too has changed core from the Spitfire core to the Morgan. As you know from previous Durons, it's basically an Athlon with less cache memory, 64kb of L2 unlike 256kb on the Athlon. Both processors have 128kb of L1 (Intel's P4 only sports 8kb of L1!).

With the core change on the Athlon to the Quantispeed core, the new Durons have taken on some of the new performance characteristics of it's big brother. You'll find the new prefetch logic on the processor along with SSE and L1 TLB (Transition Lookaside Buffer) enhancements for more efficient use of the Level 1 cache memory.

Finally, the physical updates are completed by a slight increase in die size from 100mm² to 106mm² and a few more transistors (0.18 million more at 22.18M).

We saw back with our original 1Ghz Duron review featuring the new Morgan core that the processor was very similar in performance to a 1Ghz TBird due to the new enhancements. We're expecting similar performance from the new processor to a 1.3Ghz TBird so lets see if that theory holds out.

Performance

The performance enhancements in the core should balance out the cache size disadvantage the Duron has compared to a Thunderbird CPU with identical clocks and we should see the Duron perform more or less the same.

The test platform was a system indicative of the target system the processor is likely to be found in. The Abit KG7 provides the perfect value platform. It's fast, with the AMD760 DDR chipset giving it all the memory bandwidth it could ask for and it's also fairly cheap now and full of stability, exactly what the value customer is looking for. We've paired the processor with 256Mb of Crucial PC2100 DDR memory at CAS2 (CAS2.5 stock). This is a fairly standard spec that you'll see the processor in. Windows 2000 Professional was the test operating system.

We'll take a look at the usual Sandra benchmarks and also try a quick spot of overclocking too. First off, the CPU benchmarks at 13 x 100.