Attack: Duron 1200 Takes On the Pentium 4

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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.

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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.

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Manufacturer AMD Intel
CPU Duron 1200 Celeron 1200
CPU-Core Morgan Tualatin
DIE 0,18 Micron 0,13 Micron
CPU platform Socket 462 Socket 370
Front Side Bus 100 MHz DDR 100 MHz
L1 cache 128 kB 32 kB
L1 cache speed CPU clock CPU clock
L2 interface 64 Bit 256 Bit
L2 cache 64 kB 256 kB
L2 speed CPU clock CPU clock
L2 cache range 64 GB 64 GB
MMX yes yes
Platform Support
Memory type SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM
Memory clock 133 MHz 100 MHz
Chipsets VIA KT133 bis KT266ASiS 735ALi Magik 1AMD 750 und 760 Intel 815EPTVIA Apollo 133TSiS 633/635T
3D command extension
MMX yes yes
3D Now yes no
3D Now+ yes no
SSE yes yes
SSE2 no no
Electrical Characteristics
Multi CPU support no no
Vcore 1,45 to 1,75 Volts 1,30 to 1,65 Volts
Thermal Design Power(max.) 41 Watt 27 Watt
Current (max.) 46 Ampere 48 Ampere
Thermal diode yes yes
Thermal protection no yes
Price ca. $100 ca. $130

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.