Duron

AMD Duron refers to a line of budget x86-compatible microprocessors manufactured by AMD. Released on June 19, 2000 as a lower-cost offering to complement AMD's then mainstream performance Athlon processor line, it also competed with rival chipmaker Intel's Pentium III and Celeron processor offerings. The Duron brand name was retired in 2004, succeeded by the Sempron line of processors as AMD's budget offering.

Performance

The original Duron processors were derived from AMD's mainstream Athlon Thunderbird processors, the primary difference being a reduction in L2 cache size to 64 KB from the Athlon's 256 KB. This was a relatively severe reduction, making it even smaller than the 128 KB L2 available on Intel's competing budget Celeron line. However, the originating Thunderbird architecture already featured one of the largest L1 caches at 128 KB (which was not reduced in the Duron) and also introduced AMD's switch to an exclusive cache design which effectively unified the L1 and L2 caches. Because of this, the Duron behaved as it had a high speed 128 KB cache combined with a somewhat slower 64 KB segment giving an effective 192 KB cache, verses the traditional inclusive cache (such as the competing Celeron) where the L2 cache had to store a duplication of the data stored in the L1 cache. As a comparison the inclusive design of the Celeron effectively reduced the available size of the Level 2 cache by the size of the Level 1, which would result in an effective size of 96 KB (128K-32K) contrasted to the Duron's exclusive design (128K+64K=196K).