New Duron 900 – An Inexpensive Upgrade Solution
Today AMD launched a new flagship in the company’s value segment, the Duron 900 processor, which is now officially available for $129 in 1K units. The actual street price will probably be around $90-110, just as Duron 850 (official pricing $111) is currently available for $70-100. With Duron 900 AMD is taking another logical step closer to realizing gigahertz performance in the low-cost segment. Duron 900 marks another new price/performance record in the history of microprocessors. You were never before able to purchase so much computing power for so little money.
This is particularly good news for people who want to upgrade their systems while being tied to a small budget. A motherboard with VIA’s Apollo KT133 chipset can be purchased for way less than $100 today, so that you can upgrade to a new well-performing platform for less than $200. You just keep your existing (AGP) graphics card, can continue using your PC100 (or even better PC133) SDRAM and all the other components found in your old system.
Intel’s Celeron
It seems as if Intel is finally giving up the competition against AMD’s Duron. Intel’s top value processor remains Celeron 800. This CPU is not only slower than a Duron 850 already, but also more expensive. Duron 900 is now pretty much in the same price area as Celeron 800, but the AMD processor is significantly faster. I would say that the days of Celeron are finally over. It seems as if Intel is planning to replace Celeron with the upcoming Pentium III with ‘Tualatin’-core. The shrink of Pentium III to 0.13-micron will ensure that Intel can produce this processor very inexpensively, while Tualatin’s performance will be able to compete even with slower Athlon and Pentium 4 processors.
Duron 900 Performance
We have posted many benchmark charts with Duron 900 before, so that I will refrain from blowing up this article with yet another set of benchmark results that are all showing the very same thing. Please have a look at our Duron 850-article from January 2001. It contains all the benchmark information you need.
Basically, Duron 900 is a few percent points faster than Duron 850, which would of course not be able to justify an upgrade. However, with 80 – 90% of the performance offered by a Pentium III 1 GHz, Duron 900 comes rather close to what we celebrated as the top of the world only a year ago, when we reviewed the first gigahertz-processors. Duron 900 lets you run any kind of application with more than satisfactory performance, be it office, gaming or video applications. Over are the times when value processors could only deliver mediocre computing experience.
Summary
AMD continues its lead in the market segment of value processors with Duron 900. The new AMD processor offers you more performance per dollar than you were ever able to get. Intel’s Celeron is becoming an obsolete product and I wonder how long Intel will continue keeping Celeron in its processor portfolio.
For you Duron 900 could either be a very attractive upgrade solution or the processor in your very first value-PC. Either way you will be surprised how much power you will get for your money.
