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AMD Duron vs. Intel Celeron
DeadBugs writes: "With all the hype surrounding the new Athlon XP and P4 2.2 GHz, the more affordable processors have been ignored. Tech-Report has a great article comparing the new AMD Duron and Intel Celeron. Both are now running at 1.2 GHz and have upgraded cache. The new Duron contains XP technology, while the Celeron is a PIII Tulatin with a 100MHz bus and built on the .13 micron process."
The Celeron is also crippled by the poor FPU that hasn't really changed since the Pentium II came out. The only reason why I would buy a Celeron-based computer is if heat and noise are not tolerated, beyond that, even a slower Athlon or the Duron would be the processor of choice (both for people on a budget or for people who crave speed).
Unfortunately, AMD apparently isn't ready to move the Duron to a 266MHz bus just yet. That's really a pity, but AMD wants to differentiate between the Athlon and Duron
They're not ready because to put the Duron and Athlon at the same bus speed would make their performance levels nearly equal. With the hardware prefetch and SSE we've already seen the 1 gig duron keeping up with the 200mhz fsb 1 gig Athlons. To put the cheaper Duron at 266 would give little incentive to buy an Athlon of the same grade (save for the cache).
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I don't know how a Celeron 1.2GHz can be discounted that much, as it is just over 1/2 the street price locally (Austin, TX) while the AMX XP 1.5GHz price you quote is not that much lower than the local street price. The pricing at a local place (www.laboratorycomputers.com) looks like this:
Celeron 1.2GHz $115
AMD XP 1.5GHz $133
For comparison:
Duron 1.2GHz $99
TBird 1.2GHz $112
If Intel is trying to compete with AMD, it sure looks like a no-brainer choice to go with AMD. The only question is which AMD is the best value.
On the other hand:
P3 Tualitan 1.2GHz $273
So if you have to have "Intel Inside" and you want a "1.2GHz computer", then the Celeron looks like a good deal in comparison to the P3.
"works with any Socketed Athlon/Duron cpu"
You never tried the Athlon 1.4 Ghz T-Bird with the K7S5a.On a message board with, on average, 44 posts per topic, there were 14,000 posts on the Athlon 1.4 + K7S5a. Someone did solve the problem, that being total system instability, by putting a 200 ohm resistor in parallel with something underneath the chip (soldered onto the motherboard), but I wasn't brave enough for this and settled with upgrading to an Athlon XP which works fine. Strangely enough, this issue really only reared itself en masse with revision 4 of the board, which constituted the most shipped by far. Revisions 1-3 were flakey, and oddly enough revision 0 was rock solid, from what I read (so this is hearsay), and I stopped paying attention by the time revision 5 was out.
The ECS K75SA motherboard is only $64
:).
I must also chime in as a fan of this board. I run it in my gaming rig with an Athlon XP 1600, and 512 megs of DDR. It whomps ass! Onboard 100baseT and ATA100, 4x AGP, and the SIS 735 chipset requires no fan. I got mine for $57 at newegg.com, whom I highly recommend for parts (this is an unsolicited testimonial for an independent party
Also, if you look at chipset reviews, the SIS735 comes in JUST behind the high-end Via chipsets, at many $$ less.
Yes, I put an Audigy in and disabled the onboard sound, but the AC97 is very workable if you're running a single pair of speakers or headphones.
Just my $0.02. (Note the leading zero.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
The celeron might be slower, but it beats the PII 400 I've used it to replace. I just upgraded to the celeron on my 3.5 year old Dell. $170 buys the chip and slotkit.
Because Intel is still producing inferior chips with slow bus speeds, I can play Black & White. Part of the fun of tech advances, is the way they pull up the rear, while dropping prices.
Cache Rules Everything Around Me
The new Duron is based on the Morgan core (think Athlon XP), while the 1.2 GHz Athlon is a Thunderbird, which came out at the same time as the old Spitfire core for the Duron (about a year and a half ago). I suspect that the T-bird would still beat the new Duron due to a bus speed advantage as well as the extra cache, so your point is still valid.
The new Celeron 1200mhz eludes me more than any product I've seen Intel release. Just recently I read www.tomshardware.com 's artice on celeron vs duron and although he doesn't touch on this subject at all... I can CLEARLY see in many of the benchmarks (sisoft cpu bench, as well as mp3 encoding speed) that the Celeron 1200 is indeed OUTPERFORMING the pentium 4 1400 and 1500mhz. Now is that silly? yes I think so. Do I find this terribly disturbing? yes. Why? Because enginners at intel seem to think higher MHZ is better than good cpu design. And Intels own marketing strategy is going to bite itself in the ass. Oops too late.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Here's a quote from the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual:
So the Pentium 4 is a descendent of the first microprocessor ever created and the core of the x86 instruction set is over 20 years old.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
The Intel Compiler isn't competition for MS VC++, it's a plugin. It just replaces the compiler and linker of VC++ with Intel's optimised one. It is well worth your money if you're oging to be doing serious development as it is just all around mroe efficient, even for Athlon chips.