Duron Dives In

Several months after Intel relaunched the Celeron line to quickly ramp up clock speeds, AMD has launched its competitive response: the Duron . Priced for integration into PCs priced at less than US$1000, the Duron introduces several performance features previously seen in Athlon processors, including 192KB of total on-chip cache, a 200MHz front-side bus, and a superscalar floating point unit with 3DNow!

AMD first introduced on-chip level 2 cache into its processors with the latest generation of Athlon chips, codenamed Thunderbird. On-chip cache design allows the memory to run at the full speed of the processor core, reducing the likelihood that a high-speed processor will lie idle waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. AMD claims performance increases of 25 percent over Celeron chips at the same clock speed.

Greatly increasing performance over AMD's previous value offering, the K6-2, the Duron will ship in 700MHz, 650MHz, and 600MHz varieties. The chips will be priced at $192, $154, and $112, respectively, and will be shipped in quantities of 1000.