Overclocking AMD's Thunderbird and Duron Processor

Linux Kernel Compilation

To make the understanding of this chart a bit easier I decided against the publication of the time it takes to compile the kernel. 'Smaller is better' is something many people have trouble to understand. Instead I divided 3600 seconds by the time it took to compile the kernel and published this number. Thus in the above chart 'larger is better', which should please everybody.

It was very interesting to see the big difference between Thunderbird and Duron. Obviously the kernel compilation under Linux likes a lot of L2-cache. That's why Duron lags quite a bit behind Thunderbird. However, Duron 950 is still faster than Celeron at 1 GHz. Thunderbird looks very strong here. At 950 MHz it's already a bit faster than Intel's Pentium III at 1 GHz.

Floating Point Performance

You are already used to me dividing 3600 seconds by the time it takes to render the 'ktx_rays.max' file, so that this chart also goes by 'larger is better'. You can see that the FPUs of Thunderbird and Duron are identical and so is the bus speed of both processors. Therefore we cannot expect any difference between the FPU-performance of the two. We also know that the FPU of the latest Intel processors is much weaker, so you can see that a Pentium III at 1 GHz is just as fast as a Duron 700 (which costs a fifth) in this benchmark.