AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.2GHz & Duron 800MHz

Conclusion

And there we have it, another readily available, higher clock speed, slap in the face to Intel. This time, both on the high end with the 1.2GHz Athlon and on the low end with the 800MHz Duron.

The 1.2GHz Athlon is another example of how well the Thunderbird core scales, the performance improvement over a 1GHz Thunderbird ranges from 10% almost up to 20% which is pretty impressive considering that we're talking about a 20% boost in clock speed.

Unfortunately the only problem here is that the Thunderbird core is getting a bit too hot, it's time for AMD to stop focusing on clock speed increases as its obvious that they have Intel beat there, at least for now, and start concentrating on tweaking the core. However we don't have to tell AMD this as they most definitely realize it and it would be quite shocking not to see a cooler running Athlon core in the future (how else will it make the transition to notebooks?).

The Duron is yet again giving the Celeron a very hard time, not only outperforming it, but once again out-clocking it. The unfortunate problem here is that there is still far from enough market acceptance of the Duron. This will hopefully change as lower cost platforms become available for the CPU and AMD's ability to ramp up production of very high speed parts will also help combat this issue. However as far as the informed community goes, we all know that the Duron is a very powerful gem.

While we probably won't see any higher clock speed Athlons or Durons this year in their current form, don't expect this to be the last you hear from AMD. Remember that preview we brought you all a few weeks ago? A final review is coming up very shortly....