AMD's Athlon 1400 and Duron 950

Introduction

This is a picture of AMD's new C-Athlon 1400 for 133 MHz FSB

AMD seems to hold Computex in high regards, something it certainly doesn't do with hardware journalists, because it didn't only launch the dual processor AMD760MP chipset and the AthlonMP on Computex-Tuesday, but also Athlon 1400 and Duron 950 on Computex-Wednesday. We barely managed to finish our testing of these two CPUs before Computex, but this article needed to be written in one of the many night sessions that we had the pleasure to experience in Taipei this year.

The newly released AMD processors don't mark a significant technological step. What we see is an obvious advance in process technology that allowed the release of a C-type (133/266 MHz FSB) Athlon processor that runs at a 5% higher clock than its predecessor Athlon 1333 , a B-type (100/200 MHz FSB) Athlon that comes with a 7.6 % clock rate increase over Athlon 1300, and a Duron processor with an a clock increase of 5.5% over the previous Duron 900 . You can imagine that the performance improvements seen with those moderate clock speed increases won't be too substantial, but we should remember that clock speed increases in the traditional x86-processor business are done little by little. Only the C-Athlon 1400 seems more like a marketing product than anything else. While the previous C-Athlon 1333 was launched with a 133 MHz and thus 11% core clock increase over the previous C-Athlon 1200, the new C-Athlon 1400 comes with only 66 more MHz than C-Athlon 1333.