AMD's Duron Reaches The Giga Hertz Barrier

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

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.