PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Other AMD processors

AMD has produced two special-purpose variants of the Athlon, the Duron and the SMP-certified Athlon MP:

Duron

The Duron was AMD’s answer to the low-end Intel Celeron. Just as Intel introduced the Celeron in an attempt to maintain a high average selling price for its flagship Pentium III and Pentium 4 processors, AMD introduced the Duron as a “value” version of the Athlon. AMD has produced two models of the Duron:

Duron (Spitfire core)

The Duron, code-named Spitfire and for a short time designated Athlon Value, was targeted at the value desktop market, and was to be a Celeron-killer. With it AMD straddled a fine line between matching Celeron clock speeds and performance on the one hand, versus avoiding cannibalizing sales of Athlon processors on the other. Accordingly, AMD differentiated the Duron by limiting the clock speed of the fastest current Duron to one step below the clock speed of the slowest current Athlon, by using a smaller and less efficient L2 cache, and by making the Duron only in 100 MHz FSB versions (versus the 133 MHz or higher FSB available on some Athlon models). The Spitfire-core Duron was an excellent processor for its time. It unquestionably offered more bang for the buck than any other processor sold by AMD or Intel. Although it achieved reasonable sales volumes in Europe, the Duron never really took off in the U.S. because of the absence of high-quality integrated Duron motherboards.

Duron (Morgan core)

The Morgan-core Duron is simply a refresh ...