AMD Duron 900 and Roadmap Update

Final Words

The Duron continues to prove itself as a cost effective upgrade for those that are currently looking to revive system performance while at the same time offering the perfect entry-level solution that the market has demanded for some time now. 

The Duron still suffers the same issues that its older brother unfortunately is faced with.  Without AMD's commitment to produce top tier chipsets for the CPU, the processor is completely reliant on third party solutions from ALi, SiS and VIA in order to succeed.  However as we have seen from our performance investigations of the two UMA chipsets that are currently available and targeted at the Duron's market, many of the performance advantages the Duron offers over the competition are negated by the use of these chipsets. 

The reasoning behind it is simple; with only 60% of the total cache of the Athlon, the Duron is obviously more dependent on memory performance.  The data that the CPU cannot find within its L1 or L2 caches must be retrieved from main memory, the longer that retrieval process takes, the longer the CPU must wait and the more performance is lost.  Unfortunately the memory performance of both the SiS and VIA low-cost solutions is noticeably lower than what Intel's similarly targeted chipsets are able to provide. 

For enthusiast buyers that won't be spending any time with any of the UMA solutions with integrated video, the Duron on a KT133/KT133A continues to be a great buy and is now running at close to the frequency of the fastest Pentium III. 

AMD should get used to the Duron vs Pentium III comparison since this will be the comparison made as the Celeron is phased out over time and either replaced with the Pentium III or a more Pentium III-like core.