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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
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
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.
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?
"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
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
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...
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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.
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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