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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."
From what I remember of the Intel roadmap around 1998, Intel was supposed to have come out with a 100Mhz Celeron chipset sometime in the year 2000. Obviously this didn't happen on time...
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).
Tom's Hardware did a review on this a couple of weeks ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020103/index. html
As you can see, the Celeron is actually at 1300 MHz, not 1200. Funny thing is the Duron still beats it by a good deal.
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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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Celeron is a PIII Tulatin with a 100MHz bus and built on the .13 micron process
By the way, that's "0.13 microns."
As my Nobel-Laureate physics lab professor used to say, "ALWAYS use leading zeros with decimal points; that way your readers can tell the difference between a fraction and fly shit."
Go ahead and mod me down, but I'm not a grammar nazi, I'm a math nazi!
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
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.
A decent review, I suppose.
I think it was a tad unfair to compare a Duron using DDR to a Celeron on PC100/133 (depends on the motherboard and how they set it up). They did acknowledge it directly when discussing the memory bandwidth (which showed the expected numbers, Duron was around 2x Celeron), but I think it shows only part of the picture (especially with DDR prices back up in the stratosphere compared to say, a month or two ago). This is one reason I take benchmarks with a grain of salt...it's very difficult to objectively compare AMD and Intel CPU's now due to the drastically different architectures.
The article also mentioned the Intel headspreaders...these should be reflexive on all processors. I can't count how many "Cracked core" thread's I've read on the [H]ardOCP forums...and a reasonable number of these guys are shall we say slightly above your average user.
My $0.02...
-Colin
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.
As I see it, if your game is runnning at only 30 fps, when ever the cpu has to allocate more time to other things be it AI, networking, cron jobs, etc, your fps will drop below and you will see the difference. Granted more ram will help eliminate this, but it's still something to consider I think. Also, perhaps it is just me, but I can see a difference between 30 fps and say 60-70 fps. It just looks smoother. You can also feel it as you play, it stays smooth during the whole game; perhaps that is what I think looks smoother...
:)
PS - Everytime I hear Celeron, I think of celery, when I hear duron, I think of durable.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
The Duron is actually the middle processor of the "Moron" line of precessors, designed specifically for XP. If you look in the start menu on XP and you're running a Duron you'll see the My Moron icon. The "Freon" is the fasted at 3.2 GHz but requires a gallon of coolant every 100 web pages. The "Peon" is the entry level processor. You can read the whole article here
That really impresses me. I mean, they could shrink the die size, or use SOI, or even borrow a cue from the Alpha and use SMT. But no, they went way beyond all the rumours and used XP Technology. I wonder if they had to license it from Microsoft?
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Intel is not advertising XP comaptibility of their Celeron.
Celerons do work really good with XP from my previous experience but they didn't post it on their compatibility list.
Celeron Compatibility: Fully compatible with an entire library of PC software based on operating systems such as MS-DOS*, Windows* 3.1, Windows for Workgroups* 3.11, Windows 98, Windows 95, OS/2*, UnixWare*, SCO UNIX*, Windows NT, Windows 2000, OPENSTEP*, and Sun Solaris*.
Out of curiousity, how do you know that the human eye cannot see 100fps? When you say that, what do you mean? Cannot make out detail? The flash from a camera usually lasts less than 10ms, but we see it.
I ask this because I once believed as you did and created a simple experiment to prove I was right. I took an old manual camera, removed the lens, set the shutter to 1/60 sec (its flash sync), opened up the back, put my eye up to the shutter curtain, pointed the camera at my wife, asked her to hold up some fingers but not to tell me how many, and snapped the shutter.
To my somewhat surprise, I had no trouble telling how many fingers she was holding up. So I started clicking the shutter up to higher speeds. Only at 1/1000 sec did I start having trouble.
Thus I had proved myself, and conventional wisdom, wrong. If you are getting 100fps, and you monitor is drawing 100ftps, if something important happens even for only a frame or two there is no reason your brain won't register it.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
A Duron 1.2GHZ costs $79, while a 1.2GHZ Athlon costs $72... someone explain to me why the Duron is the 'budget' CPU.
For the price of a 1200 MHz Duron, you can get a 1000 to 1100 MHz Athlon that will run rings around it. These "value" processors don't really look like much of a value to me.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When you go down 200mhz to a still-respectable 800mhz, the price plumets down to $40ish... from a decent vendor. Then you get potential. You can build a $250 countertop pc. Which is exactly what I did...
:) ).
Add $50ish for the suprisingly nice ECS motherboard (for $50, it's a GREAT deal. it's nice on quality and features. i would gladly pay twice that price for the same board) and $10 for a heatsink (amd-approved, of course).
Add another $50 for a Geforce2MX. The MX isn't a horrible card, it is sufficent for running most games...
Add (whatever) for RAM... it's SOOO cheap now. I just dug up 256mb from my closet full-o-parts. You can get that for about $30 from crucial
Add about $30 for an AMD approved psu (i can't stress the approval more. it really makes a diffrence!)
Then i added a keyboard and mouse (i got a refurbished wireless keyboard and mouse for $25. most people can find a cheapo keyboard and mouse that is more than sufficent).
I used a hard drive from an existing pc. It's fine for my purposes.
Volia! For about $250, i have a NICE countertop pc, which is hooked to the hi-fi as a jukebox(hey, that's what it was advertised as when it was purchased... oh 20 years ago
Now, granted, I used some parts i already had, which isn't fair to the price factor. Take those off, and you go up to about $400 (case+ram+hdd). There are many people who can't afford a pc due to the astounding prices. To dell and friends, i say poo!
This says a lot about the beuracocracy behind dell and all the big pc makers. Once must wonder the profit margin dell is enjoying (remember their little deal with intel... surely they are sold chips at dirt cheap prices)?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Hmm, to a non-physicist, that seems to make sense.
Think about it. A still image on the TV is actually 30 (29.97 for NTSC, actually) identical images being shown per second. When one says that the human eye can only see 30 FPS, what you're saying is that if the one of the images was different, we'd be able to see that.
Now, if that's the limit, then we can only detect an image if it lasts longer than 1/30 of a second. So if an image lasts for only 1/100000 of a second, we wouldn't be able to see it.
I'm sure this is wrong but would appreciate someone EXPLAINING why.
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
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.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Pardon me if I got any of the neuroscience wrong on that description, but I think the general idea is correct.
Cheers
Where are you getting your prices from? Pricewatch shows a different story...
a new processor licensed from Motorolla. In the vein of the Duron and Celeron, Apple has dubbed its chip the Dodecadon. It will feature a spherical chip package with one wing.
After a lukewarm reception, Apple changed the name to the "Celery", and sales went up 1400%.
(If you don't get the above [bad] joke, please "move along, nothing to see here!")
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Athlons may be only $5 more for the same speed, but Athlon XPs are not. The older T-Bird Athlons are slower than the new Durons. And the new Athlons run MUCH cooler. So you can pay $5 more for a 1.2ghz T-bird and get a slower CPU that runs a lot hotter.
How is this news? The Duron has be kicking the Celeron's tail end since the Duron's release. The Duron can usually keep up with a P3 of the same speed, or at least trail very closely behind. The fact that they are both over 1ghz is not new either, not to mention that the so-called advances for the Celeron trully haven't helped it much, as it's an aging architecture. Please people, save money, get a better product from the AMD processors. (I'd still prefer a XP over a P4 personally, I'm yet to see a P4 that didn't give me this feeling that everything for some reason loads slower, though benchmarks seem to say it can be faster in some cases...yet it's only slightly faster than a much lower clocked Athlon XP, see a problem here?)
Derek Greene
The problem with Athlon-esque CPUs is that the motherboards are still rather expensive (at least over here in Oz), thus although AMD CPUs are cheaper to purchse, you end up spending more on the motherboard anyway and the whole price advantage that the Duron has over the Celeron is negated. The price difference between the Athlon and Duron, last time I checked, was so small that the Duron doesn't really compete.
:-)
For this fact alone, if I had a choice between building a Duron box or a Celeron box, I'd choose to build an Athlon box instead
...this is getting out of hand
No, the new Duron is still unlockable with the penciltrick, unlike the XP.
At least the 1 GHz Duron with Morgan core is: I have one and unlocked it this way.
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.
You do realize who ECS is, right? You can get started with some info from these scheisters here.
:). They are unreliable garbage, IMHO.
:)
They are a distributor of PCChips, the same people who:
- Fake the speed of their motherboards
- Pirate their BIOSes
- Rewrote bioses to display fake cache amounts and glued black plastic squares to their board with bits of metal sticking out from them and etched SRAM looking part numbers onto em
- Create deceptively similar but not at all related to their brandname counterpart chipsets. VXpro, VX+, BXpro, etc. are all famous PCChips parts.
- Relabel chipsets that look/are too cheap with the above names
- Seem to be gaining a reputation on newsgroups for selling complete garbage motherboards (just look for "PCchips shit/junk/suck" on deja)
- Have an absolutely amazing number of aliases. Eurone, Houston Tech, ECS, Amptron, Protac, Aristo, Minstaple, Matsonic, Fugutech -- the list goes on and on.
- Don't label their boards properly
- Use huge jumper blocks to set memory type (no, not just 5 or 6, but jumper blocks the length of a DIMM slot!)
BTW: As a tech at a computer store I build systems with ECS motherboards (its what we sell -- no I won't say where I work
But AMD approved power supplies are a good idea. I don't know how many times I've seen cheap power supplies with the ratings simply stuck on them with an extra sticker.
I'd really reccomend swapping the board, though. Just a reccomendation. But if it is performing alright for you right now, well, stick with it. Occasionally some are actually built ok!
BTW: If you are using the board I am thinking of, its also "made" by amptron in red. Or blue, I forget which colour was for which company sometimes. With their most popular boards, by selecting the manufacturer you can select the colour. F-U-N
When Tom's Hardware Guide gave a solid rating to a PCChips board (I think its the K7S5A) I decided I'd never trust one of his reccomendations again. If you are going to rate boards you should at least do some homework on the company first!
The average consumer would assume that the Pentium chips are much faster as Intel has branded a 'fancy' new 2.2 GHz chip. Even that AMD chips *model names* only reach to +1900. (about 1.63 GHz).
Almost hilariously, AMD doesn't have to get their chips running at a 2.2 GHz frequency to get nearly the same performance.
The same speed differences per frequency show up in the lower bus-speed chips (Duron / Celeron).
The average consumer is completely unaware of the closeness between speed of the chips of each company.
AMD chips are much better priced, and carry more value for their money. Stability is excellent, speed is unmatchable in identical frequency ranges. It has been this way for a couple years now.
Aside, AMD has likely changed their naming system to make their chips 'sound' competitive compared to Intel chips? (i.e. Athlon XP 1600+ sure sounds like 1600 MHz doesn't it!).
orgnine
Comment removed based on user account deletion
10 M means 10 molar. It is used to measure the strength of the acid. If I remember right 10 molar means that there are 10 moles or 60.2 x 10^23 (a real big number) of HCl for in every liter. But I could have forgotten something somewhere...
It is also entirely possible to get HCl without taking it from your stomach. I don't remember how you get it though (as in what kind of chemistry to use, you can always buy it).
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
It's in the preferences now "Advanced"->"Scripts & Windows"
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.
Actually, it is 0.13 m (micrometer). Micron has since long been deprecated in favour of micrometer, part of our beloved SI system of units.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
You would think that someone who wanted to be respected for writing a hardware review would at least try to remember the Voltage, Current, Resistance, and Power relationships that he or she learned in high school.
Your processor may only use a supply voltage of 1-2 V, but if you still need a heatsink and fan it's obviously using tens of watts of power.
Actually, one of the problems with modern processors is that power is going up in processors while supply voltage is going down. That means much more current. Around half of the pins on modern processors are for power and ground. You start to see wierd problems with metal migration on the power supply wires, ground bounce problems from wire inductance, and all sorts of other strange problems.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I just read your link, and OUCH. Painful. That's why I can program in several computers languages, pretty much learn a new one in a few days, but I only speak one language*. (Yes, I am an IgnorantAmericanTM. God bless America. Because we need it. Just not quite as bad as everyone else)
I'll have to remember the pain of that webpage the next time I feel like grumbling about stupid compiler errors.
*I took a year of Spanish, but only speak it for vanishingly small values of speak.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
When is some Far Eastern manufacturer with
poor English (and marketing) skills going
to come out with a chip called the 'Moron'?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT