AMD Duron 750

Expendable is our third and final game benchmark under Windows 98SE and the Duron exhibits behavior similar to what we've seen under Quake III Arena and UnrealTournament, to a greater degree.

The Duron is around 10% slower than an equivalently clocked K75 based Athlon and around 12% slower than a Thunderbird. The very small performance difference between the K75 Athlon and the Thunderbird indicates that Expendable is the type of game that has less of a dependency on a fast L2 cache, and simply requires a semi-large one.

The Duron's 64KB L2 cache and its 128KB L1 cache don't seem to provide the type of storage Expendable requires for its most frequently used data, resulting in a noticeable performance drop when compared to both the Thunderbird and the K75 Athlon.

In support of the aforementioned conclusion is the Celeron's performance under the Expendable test. At 850MHz the Celeron is just barely able to keep up with the Pentium III EB at 600MHz. The fact that the Celeron's 128KB L2 cache is only a 4-way set associative L2 cache (compared to the 16-way set associative exclusive L2 cache of the Duron) most likely also plays a part in the processor's poor performance (with respect to the Pentium III clock for clock) in this test.

An advantage the Duron holds over the Celeron here is that in spite of its 'small' L2 cache it has a faster path to memory (133MHz - courtesy of the KT133 chipset) meaning that all data that can't fit within the Duron's L1 and L2 caches has a 33% faster path to the system memory than on the Celeron's BX platform. Even on the VIA 133A platform with its memory bus running at 133MHz, the Celeron at 850MHz isn't able to outperform the Pentium III 600EB.