[ Thanks to Augustus for this link.
]
“Yesterday AMD released three new chips: the Athlon XP 2100+,
Athlon MP 2000+, and Athlon 4 1600+ (mobile). Nothing really new
technology-wise here but more speed is always a good thing and a
speed notch up may be just what AMD needs to pull the Athlon XP
back ahead of the Pentium 4 “Northwood” 2.2GHz in a couple of our
benchmarks. Let’s now take a look at the latest speed demon from
AMD as well as throwing in their top Duron processor at 1.3GHz just
to see what the latest in their budget line really offers for the
money…“The technology behind both the Athlon XP 2100+ and the Duron
1.3GHz are identical. Both are built around the Palomino/Morgan
processor core with just a couple of minor differences. (For full
info on the Palomino/Morgan core see our AMD Athlon XP Linux Tested
article.) The main difference in speed will be seen with the loss
of L2 cache on the Duron. While the Athlon XP sports 256K of L2,
the Duron only has 64K. As seen on the Pentium 4 “Northwood” tests,
extra L2 cache can make a big difference in speed, especially when
it comes to compiling. The other hindrance that the Duron suffers
from is a 100MHz front-side bus. This will probably show up the
most on many of our speed tests as this will also slow down our
main memory…”