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Introduction
For
the value-conscious, the high end processors like
the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are pretty much out
of reach. AMD and Intel also are battling it out
for the low-end market with their Celeron and
Duron line of processors. The Athlon Thunderbird
had its successor already in the persona of the
Athlon XP while the Duron Spitfire had its own
in the persona of the Duron Morgan. Aside from
the changes in the core's name, it does have some
other things to have a look at. The arrival of
the Morgan core allowed AMD to scale its value
processor from 1GHz and higher; now currently
at 1.3GHz. Just like the Athlon XP, the Duron
Morgan also had its own share of improvements
to justify its arrival.
New
Stuff
The
new Duron processor still has the same 192k of
total cache (128k L1 and 64k L2). It still basically
has the same architecture but what's new in the
Morgan core is the addition of SSE support and
Hardware Data Prefetch. Aside from that, it also
has an improved L1 TLB and an onboard thermal
diode. Lastly, the Morgan core consumes less power
and thus also produces less heat than the Spitfire
core. It still runs on the same .18micron manufacturing
process but it can now scale higher.
The
one thing that the Duron probably needed was an
increase in the front side bus speed from 100MHz
DDR to 133MHz DDR. Unfortunately, the 133MHz DDR
front side bus speed is still just for AMD's Athlon
and Athlon MP/XP processors. This is probably
to still keep a distance between the performance
between the two. The Durons and Athlons benefit
a lot from a raise in the bus speed and if the
Duron Morgan was running on a 133MHz DDR front
side bus speed, it would perform very well and
probably be a threat to the lower speed Athlon
CPU's.
The
CPU
Athlon
XP and Duron Morgan
Unlike
the Athlon XP, the Duron still uses the same ceramic
packaging. There are more bridges than the previous
Spitfire-cored Duron but unlike the Athlon XP,
shorting the bridges is still like the older Athlon
and Duron processors. So that means unlocking
the Duron Morgan is still easy. Just short all
the L1 bridges and voila! Changing multipliers
can already be done.
Despite
the presence of the onboard thermal diode, there
still is a lack of support of it from motherboard
makers so it's not really useful right now. All
this mumbo-jumbo would seem pointless if the CPU
was not performing well so time for the performance
tests.
Overclocking
and Test System |
