Athlon's Little Brother
AMD is also rushing to move back to the socket. Two weeks ago the new Athlon with the Thunderbird-core was released, which will ship in a package ready to plug into SocketA, aka Socket462. Today AMD will present 'Duron', formerly known as 'Spitfire', Thunderbird's little brother.
Duron will also fit into SocketA/Socket462, so dealing with AMD-platforms will become a whole lot easier. As VIA/Cyrix is moving towards Socket370, I suppose that the end of good old Socket7 has finally come. Bye-bye Socket7, we all used to be big fans of you, but now it's really time to go.
Duron's Family Bands
Duron is the close brother of 'Thunderbird', the new 'Socket-Athlon'. As a matter of fact the architectures of Thunderbird and Duron are pretty much identical. The only two differences are the size of the second level cache and the core voltage. Thunderbird comes with 256 kB on-die and full speed L2 cache, while Duron has only got 64 kB of that stuff. In both cases the L2-cache is connected to the core over a 64 bit wide interface, which has been criticized by us as well as others at the Thunderbird release already.
Thunderbird's typical voltage is 1.7-1.8V, while Duron only requires 1.5 V. Therefore Duron produces only 22.9 W of thermal power at 700 MHz.
