Product Reviews

The Athlon XP and the latest Duron processors are both based on a new AMD core design, called 'Palomino' by industry types. Compared to the old Thunderbird Athlon design, the Palomino core uses less power. It's also better able to anticipate what data will be needed next by software and fetch it ahead of time, improving efficiency. The Palomino core also has larger 'translation lookaside buffers', as well as 52 new instructions for 3D graphics. These are essentially the same 52 instructions that first appeared in Intel's Pentium III two years ago, so there's already plenty of software around that can make use of these.

The key differences between the Athlon XP and the Duron are the clock speed, cache and front-side bus. The fastest Duron is currently 1.2GHz, while the fastest Athlon XP, the 1900+, runs at 1.667GHz. Cache is fast memory that's integrated into the processor itself where instructions can be stored until the processor wants them. The more cache a chip has, the less likely it will have to wait for the instructions

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it needs. The Duron has 192K of cache, while the Athlon has 384K. The Athlon XP also outdoes the Duron on front-side bus speed. The XP's runs at 266MHz, the Duron's at 200MHz. Both processors are supported by current chipsets, but Athlon XP not always at its maximum front-side bus speed.

Will it work in my PC?

Some older Athlon/Duron motherboards can only run the front-side bus at 200MHz, which is fine for the new Durons, but not the new Athlon XP, so you'd want to upgrade if you were mad for Athlon XP.

Whatever motherboard you have, you'll need to download the latest BIOS to recognise these new processors. Once you've updated the BIOS, you'll also need to re-install Windows from scratch. This is so it can recognise and take advantage of all the processor's new features. Otherwise you'll get hardly any performance benefit at all. AMD also advises that you download the latest drivers for your chipset from your motherboard manufacturer's Web site.

Performance

In our 3DMark tests, the Athlon XP scores 200-300 points more than the old Thunderbird Athlon, though this gap would widen a little with a faster graphics card. Crucially, it also outperforms the Pentium 4, even when the Pentium 4 is teamed up with the RDRAM Intel recommends you use to maximise its performance.

The Duron absolutely trounces its arch-rival the Celeron by almost 1,000 points in both the 2D and 3D benchmarks!

Overall

For compatibility and performance neither the Athlon XP nor the Duron can be beaten at the price. Even better, they both cost less than their Intel rivals the Celeron and P4.