AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.2GHz & Duron 800MHz

Once again we see a slight lead offered by the Pentium III over the Athlon on a clock for clock basis, however the 1.2GHz offering manages to pull away from everything else with ease.

At 640 x 480 x 16 we can truly see how well the Thunderbird core scales as the 20% increase in clock speed over its 1GHz predecessor resulted in no less than a 17% increase in performance. That's dangerously close to a 1% performance increase per MHz boost. Moving the L2 cache on-die has truly helped keep the Athlon scaling well.

Once again we have the Duron 800 offering greater performance than the overclocked Celeron 850, but the Duron is still around 10% shy of its bigger brother with four times as much L2 cache. A Duron with a 128KB L2 cache (which may not be too far away) could definitely help cut down that performance difference, but then we'd most likely see a more powerful Athlon as well...

UnrealTournament still scales fairly well with CPU speed at 1024 x 768 x 32, and the 1.2GHz Athlon continues to command a healthy lead. Limited somewhat by the video card, the 20% increase in clock speed for the 1.2GHz Athlon yields a 10% increase in performance.