Cade Metz, of PC Magazine, has written an article comparing AMD's Duron to Intel's Celeron. The device is a relatively inexpensive processor with relatively high (700 MHz) clock speeds. (Hey — what ever happened to the good old days when chips were named 186, 286, 386, 486 . . .) Metz writes . . .

“In an effort to compete with the Intel Celeron processor in the low-cost PC market, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has introduced a chip of similar design and name. Now available in machines from smaller PC manufacturers such as CyberMax, Polywell, and Systemax and soon to be used by IBM and Compaq, the AMD Duron is a relatively inexpensive chip. Like the Celeron, it operates at clock speeds as high as 700 MHz and benefits from an L2 cache.”

“The Duron uses the same processing core as the Thunderbird, AMD's first high-end Athlon CPU, which includes support for AMD's 3DNow! multimedia instruction set, 128MB of L1 cache, and a 200-MHz front side bus. While the Thunderbird chip is available with a core clock speed as high as 1 GHz and offers 256MB of L2 cache, the Duron currently tops out at 700 MHz and uses only 64MB of L2 cache.”

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