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AMD's Duron Birthed
maniack writes "The AMD Duron, the "Celeron-killer", has finally been released and lives up to the hype. According to these reviews from Ace's Hardware, Gamer's depot, Anandtech, and Tom's Hardware, the Duron thrashes the Celeron clock for clock and even hangs with the P3 in a lot of the benchmarks. Looks like AMD has another winner in the value market to go along with the Athlon."
I want to get a dual AMD system just so I can say it's a "Duron Duron".
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The word "Duro" in Italian means "Hard"... AMD's marketing should have done a bit more research on meanings... I formally give AMD an "X-Rating" :-)
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http://www.sharkyextre me.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/duron_700/
As for the speed, like I've said, the network could have had something to do with it.
For the compile options, I used the same set at home, with the same compiler. The fast-math flag is turned off in both cases. I checked, because I was surprised. I spent several hours going through docs and man pages, checking (and manually configuring) every option. I couldn't find any difference outside the chip.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
You can't really compare the prices of a Duron 700 to an Athlon 700, because all 700MHz and below Athlons are not Thunderbirds (the newer Athlons with 256KB of on-die L2). The non-Thunderbirds are being phased out. BTW, according to PriceWatch, a Celeron 700 and PIII 700 are about the same in price aswell.
Not a winner on performance; not a winner on price; not a winner, period. Pity.
I just looked at AnandTech's Duron review, and on their benchmarks the Duron was far faster than the Celeron; IIRC, a Duron 700 beat a Celeron 850 in Quake3.
And as for it not being a winner on price, on PriceWatch a Celeron 700 is about $50-70 more than a Duron 700. It sure looks like a winner to me.
I just read the review of the Duron at Sharkyextreme, and I have to say, it was really poorly done! Here's a link to it:
p u/duron_700/
i cle_id=5000159
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/c
If you look at the system specs (on page 9 I believe), he used different video cards, different sound cards and different memory for the various systems! Hardly isolating the processor/motherboard! What's more, there's no mention of which chips are running in-spec and which are overclocked (the Celeron 550 is obviously an overclocked chip since no Celeron 550 exists, but what about the other ones?). And what's all the big deal about the power consumption? Sure, 41W is too high for the mobile market, but it's not as high as the power consumption of many of Intel's PII and PIII chips, it's certainly lower then nearly all of AMD's other Athlons, and it doesn't come close to touching the 100W+ power consumption of some Compaq Alphas! Sharky also has some kinda weird numbers in his benchmarks, ie the Quake ones, where the Celeron 500 (with the older core and no SSE) scores higher then the Celeron 600 (with the improved core and SSE instructions). There were even a few things that were just flat out incorrect (ie the cache associativity of the new Celerons is only 4-way, not 8-way as stated in the article).
Anyway, here are a few reviews that were somewhat better:
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?art
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261
Intel and AMD can never play on the same mobo now.
The Athlon (and the Duron now) use *completely* different underlying architetures. If you put an Athlon into, say, an Asus CUBX, it won't post because the CUBX (and any Intel chipset for that matter) isn't DDR.
So, while an open socket and complete interopability between Intel and AMD would be nice, it will be a chilly day in Hell before it happens.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
It may be an informative site, but the number of words per page seems to be dropping all the time. And given that it's regularly linked to from slashdot, it's a pain in the arse; it takes upwards of ten minutes to read a two-minute review. And some of the picture links were broken.
I hereby suggest that a printable option be mandatory on all stories where more than one page is used. You hear me, w3c?
Offtopic? Probably. But pertinent to all our lives.
AMD had compatibility issues through the K6 release, but I haven't heard of any starting with K6/2. I've been running countless applications and games on K6/2, K6/3 and Athlon processors for quite some time and have yet to encounter a single 'compatibility problem'. The AMDs have proven to be nothing but a better value than Intel's offerings time and time again.
Frankly, the only people I have encountered to bring up 'compatibility problems' are uneducated intel loyalists who have never put an AMD into one of their boxes.
Can you provide a URL to an article that discusses these 'compatibility problems'?
Most people are only concerned with speed in their benchmarks. I switched from Intel to AMD a few years ago, for cost reasons. I started running physical simulations of wave propogations for class and lo! what do I find? The P2-300 and K6-2 300 chips produced different results! They were close, but not the same. (For those who understand this: I was using a fourth order Runge-Kutta integration with initial conditions that used a lot of exponentials.) The AMD chips actually produced more stable results: roundoff errors were more accurate more of the time! The results also came through substantially faster, but I don't know how much of that was processor, and how much was two different levels of overhead. (The school's machines were on a network, mine weren't. Both were RedHat 5.1.)
Bottom line: AMD produced better numbers, and it produced them faster. I have yet to see an official benchmark that looked at accuracy, but maybe they should.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
From the AMD press release:
The 700MHz, 650MHz, and 600MHz AMD Duron processors are priced at $192, $154, and $112, respectively, each in 1,000-unit quantities.
If I can get a genuine Athlon 700 for ~$150 now, why would I want to buy a Duron? Not a winner on performance; not a winner on price; not a winner, period. Pity.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
We've put up a review of Duron at AMD Zone, the largest AMD site on the net. We also hit a few of your problems (less pages, more paragraphs) and use more benchmarks. For example, Currently, there are five standard SPECopc viewsets: ProCDRS viewset is intended to model the graphics performance of Parametric Technology Corporation's CDRS industrial design software. IBM's Data Explorer (DX), which has 10 different tests, is a visualization application. Intergraph's DesignReview (DRV), which has 10 different tests, is a 3D computer model review package. Alias/Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer, with 10 tests, is an animation application. And Discreet Logic's Lightscape Visualization System, with four tests, is a radiosity visualization application. All five viewsets represent relatively high-end applications. These type of applications typically render large data sets. They almost always include lighting, smooth shading, blending, line antialiasing, z-buffering, and some texture mapping. So we use Specview, Seti, Distributed, and a few other benchmarks made by a friend of ours who attends the University of Illnois. QMC is best described in the words of Tim QMC tests cpu power, cache quality to some extent depending on the file Input1D0, bus io and ram. It calculates the ground state properties of a particular lattice model using a Quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. Linpack is a very interesting benchmark for comparing the Tbird to the classic Athlon because you can watch the data get too big for the CPUs caches and watch performance fall. Here is Tim's description of the benchmark. For a matrix of size N you use 8 * N * N bytes to store that matrix. For 25 sites you use 5KB. Each time the matrix is increased by 25 the memory consumption rises by 4 fold. So you use 5KB, 20KB, 80KB, .... , 5.12 MB. At some point the L2 is overflowed. At that point performance will depend on how quick data can be accessed from ram. This is where you will see a noticable performance drop, or at least you should depending on the latency of getting data from ram. So for matrices that are larger than L1(data) + L2 you are really stressing the quality of the cache and the bus speed. Also you pay a tremendous performance hit for using CAS3 ram. I think it's a very good benchmark. Also to those who commented that Athlon is about the same as Duron's price. That is off Price Watch, which is not the MSRP which was released as always in press releases, and was OEM. Duron will cost much less at Price Watch when it is readily available than its MSRP just like Athlon does now. Hope that helped.
Having read a couple of Spitfire (I can't bear to say Duron) and Thunderbird reviews I am struck by just how irrelevant the performance figures are to me. Like a lot of Slashdot readers I do a *lot* of software development and spend forever watching gcc, msvc and Delphi chew processor cycles. I'd give anything to find out the most effective platform for what I do.... how quickly Word loads or Q3A runs is not likely to be representative. The few benchmarks that these sites run that do involve a compiler (some of the Spec* tests use gcc and the ZD Content Creation bm uses msvc AFAIK) never quote the results separately from the whizzy 3D piccie software.
Wouldn't it be great if we could get hardware reviews of setups that software developers are likely to want. Is the Thunderbird really quicker than the Coppermine and Spitfire for building Mozilla on Linux(or Windows)? Is it worth paying for SCSI or is that PC266DDR SDRAM what we should hold out for?