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Reviews Of AMD Duron 'Morgan' 1GHz
Anonymouse writes: "AMD today released their 1GHz Duron, based on the morgan core, which was mentioned briefly in your earlier Athlon article. It adds hardware pre-fetch, an internal thermal diode for accurate temperature sensing on boards that can read it, and SSE instructions. It is also the same core that will become the DuronMP for ultra cheap low-end SMP system. NewsForge has a review of it under Linux, and FiringSquad and Hexus.net have reviews for it under Windows." Nice complement to the new Athlons. 1GHz in a low end processor -- sheesh!
Why is it written "Assembled in Malaysia"? Does that mean the silicon is made in Japan and then they put the ceramics on it in Malaysia?
I try to build very quiet computers. I hate computer noise, and the cooling fans are the worst.
This new Duron dissipates 41 Watts typical, 46 Watts maximum; a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird dissipates 65 Watts typical, 72 Watts maximum, or about 60% more heat. (Numbers from the AMD web site.)
Less heat means a better chance of making the computer really quiet. Instead of a noisy high-volume cooling fan for the heat sink, I can use a quieter low-volume cooling fan.
The mobile version is even tastier: only about 24 Watts for the 900 MHz version. I would drool for a MicroATX board with a couple of mobile Durons on it running SMP!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You know, as happy as I should be that notebooks will be faster, and the prices will drop on slower models, I'm strangely a bit disappointed really. As mobile processors get faster and more energy effecient, the less and less likely it is that we'll be seeing any Crusoe-based systems at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Technical specs aside, and interesting they are, it would be nice to see a list of vendors for those feebleminded souls (e.g., moi) who don't plan on building a machine by molding their own tower and smithing the wires. IBM just dropped AMD chips and Dell doesn't sell them. That leaves Compaq (ick) and, I think, HP in the heavyweight category. Also Gateway and Micron. AMD maintains what looks like an outdated list of where to buy AMD systems here: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bguide.html
Everyone is talking major CPU price war in the upcoming months, so I'm thinking October for my monster-mega-dual-mp3 player. ("2GHz, because Word just doesn't open fast enough on a P3.") Cheap dual Athlon 1.4 by then?
Saludos, Mig
http://www.kasparovchess.com
Whilst not a hardcore gamer, I am an occassional gamer, and noise is very important.
If you are listening in (say) Half-Life/Counterstrike or Quake for the sounds made by your opponents, having several fans generating 80dB by your ear is not conducive to hearing the sounds made by your enemy slowly creeping up to a good shooting position.
Therefore boxes which generate little extraneous noise are a good thing to gamers, and your frag ratio!! What you really want is a killer box with no fan noise.
Also gamers want low heat as well, a sweaty gamer fragging in just his/her underwear is not a pretty sight (and may get him/her arrested)!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The comments against INTEL for being a big company aside (AMD Is a big company as well) i have a few things that i like about AMD processors (and some i dont)
The SD Ram advantage and improved cooling should make this the budget buyers choice - the simple fact that it is a flipchip pro as well means you dont neccesarily have to buy a new board - owners of most compatible boards can simply swap chips.
The new core is a good move - the celeron crippling has bugged me a lot - i have sold a few but im not happy totally with their performance and the morgan does get around that ( i find cache comaprisons irrelevant for most users)
In australia you can pick up a Duron and Board with Ram for under $500 (approx $250US) - this is a great price - the Celerons are neck and neck but generally a little dearer - the price gets better when you go to the Tbird - the difference is up to $100 on some models of P4.
The only concern i have about Athlons (as stated in a post on todays other AMD story) is heat - i have found that the AMD processors need good cooling and this means lots of fans - which are noisy, this is a disadvantage to many of the home user (non enthusiast) market who dont want the noise of 3 or 4 fans.
If the new processors do show the claimed lower heat buildups then they will help in making the AMD accepeted in the mass (home - mums and dads) market.
As for vendor support - well the reasons arent hard to work out - IBM make their own processors and they have an already unwieldy product range so they made a decision to drop AMD - Dell are one of Intel's largest customers and i can only guess at the discounts - and Ditto Compaq. I think we will see them move towards AMD (all but Dell - thats not going to happen trust me) slowly - REMEBER THIS - most of these companies rely on their Major corporate customers for cash flow and sales (corporates buy more and are not as price concious as home and enthusiasts) and those corporates by and large Buy INTEL machines running MICROSOFT software (with 3COM nic's, HP Printers, etc etc) The coporate market is the area AMD need to win over - they have had huge success with Gamers and budget buyers but not in the corporates (they have long memories and AMD have had some spectaculat screw ups in the mid/late 1990's with chip problems - this gave them the unreliable tag in many corporate minds - they stick with what they know)
I hope this chip does all it looks like - i want one at any rate.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Oh wait - my monitor is not good enough for 119.5 and my network connection is the limiting factor for "real gamming"
It's ok anyway - at least i will know that those extra dolars give me the possibility of getting those extra 11fps
the die size of an X86 processor from either AMD or intel are Huge
AMD = 106mm^2
while a 32bit system should only take up about 2.93 mm^2 to ~10 mm^2
(this is on a 0.18 process)
no wonder transmeta reckoned that they could pull off low power
honestly where does it all go because dont tell me its logic ?
regards
john jones
As one who has been out of the hardware market lately I have a few questions. What does it take to setup an AMD MP system? The newsforge article mentions that AMD has MP certified processors but goes on to suggest that you could take 2 of these new Durons and throw them in an MP board together. Does this work with older Durons and what models of Ahtlons does it work with? Who makes good MP motherboards for AMD chips? I have seen that Tyan makes a couple. Are they any good? Thanks for the enlightenment!
In Republican America phones tap you.
The only thing slower about the K6 (-2's and -3's also) was the FPU. I run a K6-3 450, currently at 500MHz, for my Burnin' PC. It runs perfect. I have a geForce card in there, and most games, save the usual cpu/fpu killers, run fairly well.
If you don't need the killer FPU, then the K6 series is a good chip. If you have a Super 7 board hangin' around, then go for it. Otherwise, a duron system is actually cheaper to build, especially per-mhz.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
You might want to ask Anandtech and Tom's Hardware why they like them so much. AMD's work fine with Linux. Hell, even Cyrix cpu's worked fine with linux.
Ok, now on to the performance.
Let's see Intel's $107 1.4GHz cpu. Nope, their P4/1.4 is $140. For starters, damn near all the benchmarks/tests/etc show that the 1.33ghz Athlon runs circles around the 1.4/1.5ghz P4's. Sounds inferior to me. Cost? I subscribe to the "bang for the buck" theory. No other vendor gives me the computing power for the amount of cash i have to set out like AMD. Not only are the cpu's cheaper, but DDR memory is much cheaper than Rambus. But, i guess Rambus is better because it's more expensive, eh?
Trailing the chip wars. Well, if i was sleeping for 2 years, yes. But the rest of us read the news, and know that AMD is ahead in the actual speed of the "budget" cpu's, as well as price, and well, performance. The Athlon's are up to par with the faster P4's. Obviously one chip will always be faster at certain aspects, intel is faster with some tests, and AMD is faster in others. Is the $500+ for a P4/1.8 really worth it to be a couple points faster than a $107 Athlon 1.4? Nah. I'd put the extra $400 into RAM, RAID, Video, Etc.
Dollar for dollar, you can't build a faster system than an AMD Athlon.
As for being Faceless, multinational company... You might as well boycot damn near everything that's not a mom & pop operation. And I like being able to use a conductive-ink pen to unlock the AMD CPU's for overclocking. I had a 1ghz running at 1.2. Not too bad.
>soapbox mode off
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Most of the talented alpha engineers work at AMD now :P
That said, I agree with you wholeheartedly; the x86 architecture is like the painting of Dorian Gray, and should have died long ago...but thanks to IBM's unfortunate choice in the early 1980s, the x86 has the advantages of economy of scale--enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile for several companies to flog the dead horse repeatedly. (Even they agree with us; the way they've come up with to keep it alive is to set up a Potemkin CPU, with a decent internal architecture that we, alas, can't get to.) Yes, we're geeks, and if I weren't in a situation in which I got more money for singing at Renaissance fairs than I did for stock options (true story!), I might go for an Alpha. But the hardware of the masses is inexpensive and improving steadily. (Did the Alpha's speed increase as quickly as that of x86oid CPUs?) If we geeks can take advantage of it, why shouldn't we?
"Intel Corp. will introduce its 2 GHz Pentium 4 processor next week, the latest salvo in its ongoing chip war with archrival Advanced Micro Devices."
3 7_ 1.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nf/20010820/tc/129
-Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
That was unkind and uncalled for. If you're going to insult me, please do it with a modicum of intelligence and have the balls to sign your name to it.
What a flake.
-Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Oh, one more thing. He's got a hotmail addy, that explains it all. *cough* Wintel.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
"My next computer will be an AMD."
I've said that ever since the Athlon was released, but as it turns out, my next computer will be Intel. Why? I'm buying a laptop. As a matter of fact, it will be my sole machine as I'm getting rid of my three desktops, so I needed something powerful with a good screen. The biggest screen with the highest resolution I could find was on a Dell Inspiron 8100 or an IBM A22P. Both of these are available with Intel only. HP doesn't make a 15" UXGA laptop, but they do make AMD laptops.
I would have gone with the AMD solution if I had the choice, but for now, my needs dictate an Intel.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I'll pay you to ship 12 of them to me.
1 GHz for the low-end...sheesh...
I thought my system was low end - now it might as well be "destined for the scrap pile"...
I have a Celeron 366 - my board can only go up to a 667. Last night I just maxed out my ram at 768 meg (hey, when you are running KDE and Netscrape, every bit counts - someday, I will make the switch to Konq, or Moz). I still have yet to upgrade my hard drive - I have only a couple of 4.3 gig drives in the box. Perhaps I'll get one of them new-fangled 40 (60? 80?) gig drives someday - though I am saving up for a house, so it will take a while.
I guess I should feel good that most of my system is made up of stuff no one else wanted - and it does what I need, which is all that matters...
It feels almost...retro (though if I really wanted that, I would break out my TRS-80 CoCo 3 with 512K of RAM, at a blazing 1 MHz (2 MHz with high speed poke!), and 160K floppy drive - yehaw!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Well I don't want to restate what the other 3 comments so far have said, but if I do *oops*.
:)
My numbering of the points isn't me being angry, it's just how I organize my thoughts
(1) regarding the 1st & 2nd paragraph: couldn't have stated it better than the other people... you must have been asleep the past couple of years. Only reason K6's didn't kick Celerons in FPU was their FPU wasn't pipelined, the Athlon line fixed that.
(2) 'exploiting mexican workers' -- really? I seriously hadn't heard that, I'd sure like to see an URL to a *trustworthy* website regarding this, else sounds like you've gone too far on blowing steam.
(3) Ok, I'll admit it, I'm an EE major who cooped at AMD for a semester, I believe in them very much. And well, while I can't give you specifics because of NDA's, frankly, I'm 100% sure AMD is ahead of Intel in the CPU market.
(4) regarding the 3rd paragraphs: that pertains to x86 in general, *NOT* AMD specifically, which is where your rant was going, try to stay on topic.
(5) Of course AMD has reaped the benefits of x86, so have several other companies... Intel, Cyrix, Rise, Transmeta, VIA, Asus, Epox, MSI, etc, etc, etc. It's got marketing power, even though it is ancient in computing terms.
(6) In case you missed AMD's move to befriend the hacker community: http://www.x86-64.org -- software version of their hammer family line, so the hacker community can make 64bit x86 Linux, FreeBSD, etc, etc.
(7) Unfortunately most large corporations are 'faceless', you get big enough and you can't be "mom and pop" to everyone. Just like presidential elections... can't expect the candidates to meet and talk to 275 million (or so) Americans individually in the course of a couple of years, not going to happen. 2 years is: 63,072,000 seconds, or 0.229 secs/person. Now consider AMD serving ~6 billion people...
(8) Oh, and all that about AMD coming out with stuff a year behind Intel... That's nonsense! AMD may have trailed in the past, but they're keeping up pretty well now, and even without supporting SSE/SSE2 yet on duron & so forth, they still manage to kick butt in most arenas, including gaming. Not to mention, Intel created x86, MMX, SSE/SSE2... AMD licensed such technologies, so were they supposed to release that stuff *BEFORE* intel? But on AMD's behalf, they are the ones creating the x86-64 (aka - AA64, see www.sandpile.org) architecture, which Transmeta wants to use, so they'll come out ahead in that arena, while Intel tries to push Itanium (*yawn*).
a) It is true that AMD does not offer Intel's performance. It offers better performance than Intel since the introduction of the Athlon. That's exactly why they have techie supporters these days.
The Athlon in its different iterations has proven itself to be superior to its equivalent (P-III), and (at least) equivalent to its "superior" (P-IV).
Unless you have the money to waste hundreds of dollars in RAMBUS memory and high-speed P-IV to get a very marginal difference, to say the Athlon is inferior doesn't make sense. If you do have that kind of money to waste, the x86 itself doesn't make sense.
AMD is cheaper because it cannot afford to be more expensive. Intel has brand-recognition and market domination. The traditional strategy for the player in Intel's situation is to exploit their brand and reap high profit margins, and for AMD's position it is to reduce their profit margins in a price war to gain market share. There's no mistery, and no performance rationale, around it.
b) AMD has not been catching up in advancements and extensions. Rather, it has done decently, while Intel has not done much at all since the P-III (the P-IV can be best described as "not much"). There has been nothing to "catch up" to since then.
About the only thing Intel has been able to offer is higher prices for the similar performance (RAMBUS, P-IV), motherboard recalls and lawsuits. Intel's new technology in the P-IV just doesn't seem to translate to performance.
One can only hope it's just they've been focusing on their upcoming products rather than on ye olde Pentium line... maybe then we'll see the actual results of their experiments.
c) Many slashdotters support space exploration financed by private agencies. They're not launching rockets full of tourists to Mars for more or less the same reasons they didn't put an Alpha in their boxes.
d) Yes, the x86 is a hacked , patched, overextended, underdesigned chip architecture. It feels like we've been forced to "upgrade" our Ford T's ever since they existed instead of getting new designs.
e) AMD doesn't care that much about Linux because it doesn't affect it's business enough. That's part of being a faceless multinational company with a single obligation to your shareholders.
However, they do befriend other technical communitites. Not all geeks are Linux zealots, and being technically knowlodgeable does not translate in being an card-carrying member of the Open Source community or reading Slashdot.
AMD cares about the techies that spend enough money for them to care about. Gamers, power-users, overclockers and hardware enthusiasts buy expensive processors. Linux geeks do so mostly when they belong to one of said communities.
Intel would care more about Linux because it can make them money in other markets. Same goes for IBM. Same goes for Sun. For them to act in any other way would be simply illegal (they would betray their shareholder's interests)
Note, however, that AMD has (or had as far as I know) strong ties with SuSe with respect to their SledgeHammer development efforts and their Linux SledgeHammer simulator. I think their dealings with Transmeta also had a strong Linux flavor. All because it was on their shareholder's best interest (as in it made money for AMD). It may be that the lack of publicity of AMD's Linux endeavors has much to do with the end of the Itanium/SledgeHammer hype
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Notice that current motherboards are not able to handle the thermal diode because they didn't exist at the time the boards were manufactured. Instead, one will have to rely on the onboard external sensor until new mobos are released.
Now I see why my Hexus benchmark post on the Athlon article didn't get modded up.. it was because it was important enough to get on the benchmarks article...
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
There are plenty of "geek" charities where you can donate these computers. See a couple here. Also check out private schools in your area.
Many organizations in third-world countries will use these as production systems. A couple years ago, I managed to scavenge about 12 throw-aways from various companies and sent them to my father-in-law's business in Jamaice, where they were perfectly suitable for their DOS-based accounting system.
There's also a review of it at Tech Report, right here.
since Pentium II. What's the big deal with that? It's upto the motherboard vendors to impliment the circuitry.. it always has been.
And hardware pre-fetch? Ummm hi welcome to the last year? These aren't major new innovations at all.
Oh wait.. but it's AMD and not Intel in the news.. by default it's gotta be a great-new-better-thing.
but since you need enough power to DVD generation this is probably not an option.
;) But then again, noise isn't a big deal at all while watching DVD's, since I have the Digital Out plugged into a Dolby Digital Receiver, connected to 6 nice JBL speakers, and two nice subwoofers with their own Amp/X-over, and my wife loves to crank the volume up on the thing :p
:D So she heard no arguments from me :) Now I just gotta save up for a nice LCD Projector, and I'm set...
Really? I play DVD's on a lowly P-II 450, and it works fine. Then again, its going through a Hollywood Hardware Decoder board
Surprisingly, dropping all that cash on the "Home Entertainment" system was my wife's idea
Did anyone else think the title said AMD Duron 'Moron' at first glance?
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I about creamed my pants reading that.. since my budget is restricted by my own personal bank account manager (read...my wife..) its tough to get a "loan" approval to build some badly needed servers. Currently I could only muster up a dual ppro 200 and a sketchy p200.. The ppro does fine for now, but I need something with a little more power. Dual proc durons would be a great, cheap alternative to dual proc pIII's or the athalon mps! Yea!
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
I was under the impression the Athlon MP was really a Athlon 4 (Palomino), which Morgan is based on, so if i'm correct does this mean this chip can be used in the MP motherboards without any tweaking? If not, when are the "offical" Duron MPs due?
i know that my next system will be a duron. I've been using AMD since the k6-2 300 and now have a k6-2 500 (that does rather nicely) but the system is showing signs of age where games are concerned. but i hadn't even thought about a duronMP system. I think that would just be k-rad. reminds me of the websites that showed you how to solder on your celery stick so you could use them in a dualie.
-
I have two Desktop systems (both Athlon) and they have turned out great, I haven't had one problem yet and the performance has been fantastic. The reason the Duron only accounts for a small percentage of AMD's sales is because the price difference between an Athlon and Duron is down to the single digits. A few months ago Durons were a good value when the high end Athlons were over $500 dollars, but now there isn't a big enough price gap to justify purchasing a Duron over an Athlon.
Its always amazed me that ever since a heatsink was wacked on a CPU, that an internal temperature shutdown circuit was not implemented. I use sub $1.00 chips in designs that have this feature, yet a $400 CPU doesn't.... and now all AMD is giving is a crummy diode junction!! I 'spose in the end, a thermally destroyed CPU means one more sale!!
46137
Exactly. VIA chipsets are terrible. The SiS735 shows promise, and ALi chipsets are slow (but stable). AMD needs to just take the plunge and start mass producing their own chipsets, much like Intel.
I have built a few AMD760 based systems, and they are just as stable as our Intel workstations. The only differences are the AMD workstations are cheaper, and run MUCH faster with our scientific applications under Linux.
It wasn't all that long ago that you couldnt even BUY *ANY* "retail" Athlons (or any AMD chip, for that matter), at least here in Oz.
And, if you wish to pay an extra 20 bucks for a cardboard box and spiffy sticker, then good for you. Personally, I'd rather have my extra 20 dollars.
...this is getting out of hand
hey ... i got a dreamcast recently ... and it's cheaper than the duron.
... it comes with a processor, is 3d capable, and a 56k modem and it's just $79 (i paid $99 :( )
... most of you want a hotter (ahem ... better) processor so that you can play games ... but i figure ... playing games on a pc is not all that smart.
... it cost's more to set up a pc ... and just when you get the drivers loaded properly, there's a faster chip on the market ... and within a year, the new games that are released are gonna run rater slow on your pc. now, consoles are more resestant to this sort of phenomenon.
... that's just my $79!
lemme see
thing is
hear me out first
well
BC
I haven't found the perfect CPU fan yet.
I have used the Orb fans; the computer I'm typing this on has a Chrome Orb. The web site I bought it from claims it is 29 decibels, which is quieter than most, but that CPU fan is by far the loudest thing in this computer.
So I'm still looking. Here are my top contenders:
Silverado -- as reviewed on Tom's Hardware. But I don't know where to buy one (my web search found a place in England that sells them, but I don't know where to get one in the USA).
Thermalright SK6 -- an all-copper heat sink; you can put any 60mm fan you like on top. So, if I can find a really quiet 60mm fan, this would be a winner. Because it is copper, this heat sink really works; copper is better than aluminum.
Zelman CNPS3100g -- this heat sink is gold-plated copper, for maximum heat sinkage. It looks like a flower. It comes with a separate fan, which is said to be very quiet.
Now, as a rule, small fans with high RPMs will be noisier than big fans with lower RPMs. So my next computer will have a 120mm on the back, below the power supply. I'm hoping that if I put the Zelman on a Duron that I just might be able to get away with no CPU cooling fan; the 120mm fan might draw enough air over the Zelman to make it work. I can only try, and if it doesn't work, I'll go with a CPU cooling fan after all. We'll see.
I heard that in a month or two there will be heat sinks available that use 80mm fans instead of 60mm fans! Since bigger, slower fans are quieter than smaller, faster fans, in theory an 80mm fan should be able to be very quiet. And I have some very quiet 80mm fans (the so-called "Silencer" fan from PC Power and Cooling). The Silencer fan uses a hard drive power connector though, and I'd rather use a 3-pin connector (with tach for the motherboard to monitor the fan). Still, the Silencer shows how quiet an 80mm fan can be.
There is a gadget called the Digital Doc 5 that mounts in a 5.25" drive bay, and controls multiple fans. It can be set to keep an eye on the temperature, and turn on more fans if it goes too high. So perhaps I can set up the Zelman with its fan, but its fan will default to being off; and if the fan is needed, the Digital Doc 5 will turn it on.
http://www.macpower.com.tw/digitaldoc5.htm
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely