AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.1GHz

Under Expendable, the 1.1GHz Thunderbird is able to sneak up right behind the fastest platform in the roundup, the 1.13GHz Pentium III on an overclocked BX133 platform.

The performance breakdown is similar to what we've seen previously, except this time the Duron is considerably slower than even the K75 Athlon. An overclocked Duron running at 900MHz is around 9% slower than an equivalently clocked Athlon, but the Thunderbird doesn't offer a huge performance increase over the regular Athlon. Expendable is an example of a situation where a larger L2 cache is favored over a faster one, meaning that the 128KB L1 + 64KB L2 cache of the Duron isn't enough for Expendable, meaning that the CPU must go all the way over to main memory at either 100 or 133MHz in order to gather data. Both of the Athlons, with their 128KB L1 + either 256KB or 512KB L2 cache perform much better since they aren't running all the way over to the system memory for data as much courtesy of their larger L2 caches.

In spite of this disadvantage, the Duron remains dominant over its chief competitor, the Celeron which is still heavily penalized by its 66MHz FSB. Even when overclocked using the 100MHz FSB, the 850MHz Celeron is still barely able to hop in front of the Duron running at 600MHz.

Once again, the Pentium III vs Athlon race is very close, performance is nearly identical, the deciding factor here should be price.