Duron 1200: Low-Cost Superior To High-End?

Marketing strategies are making it hard for even the manufacturers themselves to divvy up the chip market into clear segments. By and large, the product range covers everything from low-cost to high-end performance products. Lately, the computing power available has increased substantially; however, only a handful of users are making full use of it. This begs the question, "What's the difference between a low-cost processor and the high-end model?" After all, the performance spread is by no means as wide as it was several years ago.

By introducing a 1200 MHz Duron, AMD has stepped up the pace of its low-end Durons. This new top-level model costs about 100 dollars. The price tag for its direct competition, the Intel Celeron 1200, is comparable, at about 130 dollars. Technically speaking, there's not much new to tell - apart from an extra 100 MHz added to the clock speed, it's not that much different from the Duron 1100 that we tested 6 weeks ago in the article Lo-Cost Duel: Duron 1100 vs. Celeron 1200 .

New low-cost top model: the AMD Duron 1200 with SSE support for about 100 dollars. In contrast to the Athlon XP, the CPU is still housed in an obsolete ceramic case - CPGA.