Review: AMD Duron

Details on the Duron

The Duron is based on the Athlon's CPU core, which we subjected to an in-depth review as described in our article Details on the Athlon The feature is currently only available in German - please bear with us. The Duron's die is 100 square millimeter in size and holds 25 million transistors. The Thunderbird's new L2 cache takes up roughly 20 per cent of the die surface, which is now 120 square millimeter in size and accommodates 37 million transistors. The die of the old Athlon which was designed for Slot A only featured 22 million transistors.

The Duron, which is based on 0.18 micron technology, only requires a core voltage of 1.5 Volt. The versions from 750 MHz upwards rely on 1.6 Volt, which is shown by the figure on the core voltage (taken from the Duron specs). The voltage requirements of the Athlon (Thunderbird) vary from 1.7 to 1.75 Volt.

When it comes to power consumption, the Duron is economical, too. It runs on approximately one third less power than the Thunderbird. The Celeron 600, for example, is content with 18 Watt.