What's The Catch Of Morgan's New Features?
Well, don't expect too much. The new Duron won't be a major amount better or faster than its predecessor, but the 'Morgan'-core is certainly a reasonable win for its owners. The SSE-implementation can speed up the new Duron in applications that were once optimized for Intel's Pentium III processor. The new core design reduces the heat production of the new Duron and the thermal diode can safe its life, even though the implementation is still not as fool proof as Intel's. The other enhancements (hardware data pre-fetch, TLB-design changes) are also able to make 'Morgan' a little bit faster than before, so that Duron 1 GHz will be able to perform better than what the mere core clock increase from 950 to 1000 MHz would suggest.
Test Setup
| Athlon/Duron 100/200 MHz FSB Test Platform | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asus A7V, BIOS 1008, VIA KT133 Chipset, VIA Driver 4in1 4.32v |
| Memory | 256 MB PC133 Wichmann WorkX SDRAM, CL2, 2-2-2 |
| Athlon 133/266 MHz FSB Test Platform | |
| Motherboard | MSI MS-6341 K7 Master, BIOS 1.2, AMD760 Chipset |
| Memory | 256 MB Micron PC2100 DDR-SDRAM CL2, 8-8-5-2-2-2-2 |
| Tualatin Test Platform | |
| Motherboard | MSI 815 EPT Pro, BIOS rev. 1.0 |
| Memory | 256 MB PC150 SDRAM |
| All Systems | |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra, Driver 12.40 |
| Hard Drive | IBM DTLA-307030, ATA100, 7200 RPM |
| NIC | 3Com 3C905B-TX, 100 Mbit/s |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 98 SE |
| Screen Resolution | 1024x768x16x85 |
We didn't want to bore you with too many benchmarks, so we cut the test runs down to those that were done with the Tualatin processor we tested previously.
