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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."
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 wish Intel wouldn't have cut off the Tualatin P3 so quickly, as it would make a decent dual processor system... but now I'll be getting a dual Athlon instead :)
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.
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
A Duron 1.2GHZ costs $79, while a 1.2GHZ Athlon costs $72... someone explain to me why the Duron is the 'budget' CPU.
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.
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 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.
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