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."

Comments

Just so you know...

[Daniel Wood]

Tom's Hardware already did a review of the Celeron 1300 vs the Duron 1200 (benchmarks included the Celeron 1200) where the Duron simply spanks the Celeron.

SIS has restored my faith in AMD. The ECS K75SA motherboard is only $64 after shipping and works with any Socketed Athlon/Duron cpu. It is fast and stable, accepts DDR and SDR, built in networking and sound(ok, AC'97 isn't that great), a real winner. You can build a 1GHz system and only pay $120 for the cpu, heatsink/fan, and mobo.

relative cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Do these low cost cpu's matter anymore? Celerons do not stand for value.

In the mid 90's sure it was a huge cost difference $100 for that celery 300a@450mhz vs p2-p3 450 at about $500.

As of right now celeron ghz is about $58
( http://www.pricewatch.com )
AMD XP 1500 $107

Thats the battle, now I'll give you 3 guesses which is a better value.

Software Optimization

[DarkEdgeX]

The P3 adds SSE (yeah, like that is used a lot) and brings the cache on-die with the Copper[less]mine processors.

Actually, this brings up an important issue-- compiler technology, and the run-time libraries (RTL's) they use (in the case of C/C++, the standard libraries, in the case of Pascal/Delphi, the RTL and possibly parts of Borland's VCL/CLX). The problem, it seems to me, is that compiler authors don't seem to take advantage of architecture specific improvements like they used to (and as they should). Sure, some libraries/RTL's take advantage of it (and the compiler may have switches to emit optimized code), but if the standard libraries/RTL's are re-compiled (or even re-written) to take advantage of it, then it's all for nothing.

It seems to me that Intel has the right idea (the FPU is really useless if you know HOW to use SSE and SSE2 properly), and that if anything, it's poor software authors and poor compiler writers that are to blame for the lackluster performance of code on Intel's CPUs. It's saddening to me to see the optimization skills software engineers *used* to have back in the day diminishing year by year as the ability to right crappy code is justified by ever-faster CPU's. (Why spend the weeks or months needed to engineer everything to run properly now, when Intel/AMD will have a 'fix' for our sloppy code out in a few months?)

I wish authors such as Michael Abrash still released optimization guides for assembly language (or even just updated versions for C/C++ and assembler).. his 'Zen of Code Optimization' (ISBN: 1-883577-03-9 *or* FatBrain.com's description (out of print)) was probably the best investment *I* ever made.

Re:Benchmark woes

[dbarclay10]

I would agree with you, if the review was actually a comparison of technologies.

Of course, if that were the case, then it wouldn't be a review - it would be a comparison of technologies :)

However, since it *is* a consumer-oriented review, the focus is obviously on performance vs. price and a number of other factors; all easily summed up in the term "value".

Since both the Duron and the Celeron have similar prices and are both targetted at the same market(at least in retail), then it's totally fair to compare them, despite the fact that they have some relatively different technologies.

Now, I would say it's unfair to compare, say, an Athlon XP 2000+ to a 386 used in "embedded" markets. This review, however, is more than fair :) Saying it's otherwise would be like saying it's unfair to compair the first- and second-place winners in the Olympic men's triathlon; yes, obviously one is faster than the other. Maybe they've got more endurance(greater memory bandwidth), maybe their muscles are bigger(stronger FP units), but if you're not going to compare those two, what else are you going to compare? The winning triathlon athlete vs. the winning 100m swimmer? :)

Thought so ;)

Re:Intel has gone totally mad

[RadioheadKid]

I know that there seems to be a lot of bashing of the Celeron and Intel's marketing, but in some ways I see it as a response to the market.

It used to be when you talked about a PC, you gave the specs of your hard drive, RAM, graphics adapter, whether or not it had a soundcard, and what number came before the 86 in the processor name 2,3, or 4.

Now having over 256 MB of RAM is not unreasonable. Hard drives size is mostly irrelevant, sound cards are standard, and except for the gamers, a graphics card is where you plug your monitor in and it works. So what's left to spec? MHz! It's a number, it sounds technical and the Wintel PC marketing machine has jumped right on it. So much to the point that AMD now puts 4 digit numbers in their processor model name that don't necessary represent the clock speed of the processor, but keep up with Intel's current MHz release.