AMD Duron 900 and Roadmap Update

Winstone 2001's focus on a light multitasking load takes into account disk performance, which is always a limiting factor, as well as overall platform performance through the interaction of the FSB and memory buses.  The test is mainly integer oriented which is why the Pentium 4, not shown above, does not do particularly well in the benchmark courtesy of heavy branch mis-prediction penalties. 

Starting off with Content Creation Winstone 2001 gives us a 2.5% increase in performance over the Duron 850 courtesy of the 5.8% increase in clock speed.  The ratio of performance to clock speed increase results in a 43% mark of efficiency, meaning that although the performance is scaling relatively well there are still a few bottlenecks present. 

The most obvious bottleneck in this case remains the size of memory and the speed of the hard drive.  Because we used 256MB of PC133 SDRAM and an IBM 75GXP in the test, it is unlikely that you'd be able to get a larger performance increase out of upgrading any other one component in our test system.

It is important to note the poor performance of the 66MHz FSB Celerons courtesy of their castrated 66MHz FSB.  The processor is only as fast as its weakest link and in this case, only being able to be fed by a 66MHz bus and its 4-way set associative L2 cache is truly holding it back.  The 100MHz FSB Celeron 800 does perform noticeably better, and actually remains relatively competitive. 

The entry-level Duron 900 actually offers 88% of the performance of the high-performance Athlon running at 1GHz in this particular test, which happens to resemble the way in which many users use their PCs. 

The Business Winstone 2001 test is much like the Content Creation test in that the benchmark does do a good job of simulating normal PC usage, and likewise it falls victim to the same bottlenecks. 

Because of this, the performance picture does not change much although the Duron 900 now offers 90% of the performance of the Athlon 1GHz and the Pentium III 1GHz actually pulls ahead of the Athlon by approximately 6%. 

Remember, the Pentium III has a much wider internal bus to its L2 cache so the data can be accessed quicker.  In business applications that are generally highly L2 cache dependent for peak performance, the Pentium III's 256-bit internal bus to its L2 cache does come in handy (the Athlon only has a 64-bit path to its L2 cache).