Attack: Duron 1200 Takes On the Pentium 4

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

Nonetheless, AMD's current presentation is creating the impression that the manufacturer is pursuing a more aggressive marketing strategy than before. AMD isn't shy about making direct comparisons between its products and competing products, particularly those manufactured by its arch-rival, Intel. We focused our performance tests on the Celeron and the Pentium 4/1400.

AMD's new Duron 1200 promises up to 300 percent more power than a Celeron 1200. Even the Intel Pentium 4/1400 is supposedly up to 13 percent slower than AMD's low-cost processor.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Once we heard these bold announcements, we decided to expand the testing ground in our Munich lab. This time around, the Intel Celeron 1200 was tested under Windows XP and Linux (using the latest kernel version). Our first step was to run the new benchmarks on all the low-cost processors under Windows XP.

This much is clear from the start - the Duron is a powerful processor that performs almost the same as the slightly slower Athlon processors. There were a few surprises in this test, though - as far as performance is concerned, the Duron 1200 manages to attack the much more expensive Intel processors.

This chart shows a side-by-side comparison of the two low-cost competitors. The AMD Duron 1200 is manufactured using the 0.18 micron process, while the Intel Celeron 1200 with the Tualatin core is based on 0.13 micrometer-wide strip conductors.